Author Archives: Coah Staff Admin

Are you interested in research about memory loss, dementia, and Alzheimer’s disease?

I am. I believe research is where the future is—treatments, interventions, discoveries—and, speaking as someone who was a caregiver to my mom who died from a type of frontotemporal dementia known as Pick’s Disease, I find hope and comfort in the promise of interventions for Alzheimer’s disease, dementia, and memory loss.  The #BrainMatters Twitter chats described below, facilitated by the Johns Hopkins Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center (JHADRC), are pivotal to sharing critical information among the masses.

Researchers and members of the broader community who want to learn more about research are invited to follow the JHADRC’s “Memory & Aging” Twitter handle on Thursday, February 24 starting at noon ET to catch their #BrainMatters Twitter chat on the “State of Research on Memory Loss, Dementia and Alzheimer’s Disease.” It is very easy to do—simply be on Twitter during the event, and follow @JH_Memory_Aging.  The chat will unfold in real time, and anyone may contribute to the conversation.

According to the Alzheimer’s Association’s website: “Recruiting and retaining research participants is now the greatest obstacle, other than funding, to developing the next generation of Alzheimer’s treatments. Individuals with dementia, caregivers and healthy volunteers are all needed to participate in clinical studies focused on Alzheimer’s and other dementias. Without clinical trials, there can be no better treatments, no prevention and no cure for Alzheimer’s disease.”

For the upcoming Twitter Chat, we look forward to hearing from Johns Hopkins researchers at the Agrawal Lab and the HEADS Center, and Drs. Rosenberg, Smith and Pettigrew, and from researchers with the George Washington University’s Institute for Brain Health and Dementia.  They will explore the following topics:

• Ongoing research in this discipline
• Research about dementia risk reduction
• New research findings
• Local studies seeking new research volunteers and how to get involved
• Factors that motivate people to become research participants
• How research influences treatment, care, and interventions; and
• The importance of diversity in memory loss research

The live #BrainMatters Twitter Chats have been an excellent opportunity to engage with leading researchers and advocates on brain health at Johns Hopkins University, throughout the Mid-Atlantic, and across the nation. Here’s what collaborators and past participants are saying about it:

“Volunteering gives voice to groups that can affect service, research and voting.”

-Jo Ann Scipio, RN, Delta Sigma Theta Annapolis Alumnae Chapter

“Alzheimer’s disease is a growing global health crisis.  Research is critical to address this crisis, in order to achieve breakthroughs in treatment and prevention. These Twitter chats provide a platform for information sharing and discussion of some of the more pressing issues in brain health, early detection, health disparities, and research.”

-Ilene Rosenthal, Alzheimer’s Association Greater Maryland Chapter

“The Brain Matters collaboration is helping to elevate discussions on the importance of brain health, raising awareness of critical issues including equity, and engaging new audiences through interactive and insightful conversations – all free and open to the public!” 

-David Parkes, AARP Global Council on Brain Health

“As geriatricians, we believe it is important to meet older adults and their families where they are, and for many, that is on Twitter! Our bodies have an incredible capacity to regenerate and heal. Supporting brain health helps us all thrive. Research helps us find a way forward.”

-Dr. Alicia Arbaje, Johns Hopkins JHAD-RCMAR

“The #BrainMatters chats have been a fun and innovative way to share emerging scientific findings on topics related to brain health, memory loss, and aging with members of the community.”

-Dr. Corinne Pettigrew, Johns Hopkins ADRC 

#BrainMatters is a regional collaboration that is dedicated to sharing science-based information about brain health, health disparities, memory loss & Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias. In addition to the JHADRC, collaborators include the Greater Maryland Chapter of the Alzheimer’s Association, the AARP’s Global Council on Brain Health, the Johns Hopkins Alzheimer’s Disease Resource Center for Minority Aging Research (JHAD-RCMAR), and Delta Sigma Theta Alumnae Chapters from Annapolis and from Columbia, Maryland.

If you cannot make the live chat, you can catch up with the content later simply by searching #BrainMatters on Twitter. Doing so will also show content from prior chats on “Brain Health” and “Achieving Brain Health Equity.”  You may also be interested in following #JHMemoryResearch over the coming months as the JHADRC will be sharing additional information about ongoing research studies, Research Team Spotlights, and Research Participant Testimonials. The entire @JH_Memory_Aging Twitter feed is chocked-full of golden nuggets!

Any questions? Email tony.teano@jhu.edu

 

By Anthony Teano, Communications Specialist

Alden L. Gross, PhD, an Associate Professor in the Division of Epidemiology of Aging at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and a Core Faculty member at the Center on Aging and Health in the Division of Gerontology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine will present “Measurement and Structure of Cognition across the world: Statistical  harmonization of the HCAP studies” at the March 7th Scientific Seminar Series.  In person attendance is encouraged.  To attend via zoom, registration is required at https://bit.ly/3gGC2rb

Hopkins Geriatricians Identify Biomarkers Linking Social Isolation & Mortality

Congratulations are in order to COAH champions Dr. Thomas Cudjoe, Shang-En Chung, Dr. David L. Roth, and Dr. Cynthia Boyd from the Division of Geriatric Medicine and Gerontology and Dr. Roland Thorpe, Jr., from the Bloomberg School of Public Health for their timely and significant research paper: “Getting under the skin: Social isolation and biological markers in the National Health and Aging Trends Study.”  The full journal issue with this article went live on Feb. 6, 2022 and can be found here.

Also, collaborators outside of COAH included Dr. Carl Latkin from the Bloomberg School of Public Health and Sruthi Selvakumar, who was a Summer Research Trainee through the Division of Geriatric Medicine and Gerontology’s MSTAR Program.

Importantly, they found that social isolation and extreme social isolation are associated with higher levels of IL-6 and CRP, biomarkers of aging associated with deleterious health consequences over time—including increased mortality and morbidity.

Until now, social isolation was considered a risk factor for morbidity and mortality comparable to smoking, hypertension, and a sedentary lifestyle, but the science behind that deleterious association was not understood. Consequently, the discovery that social isolation is clearly linked to IL-6 or CRP may be instrumental to interventions mitigating social isolation’s negative health outcomes.

What follows is a brief interview with Dr. Cudjoe about it.

Tony Teano: How will this discovery help shape interventions?

Dr. Cudjoe: I think about this work as one of the steps in understanding how biological markers might be used as an outcome measure for social isolation intervention studies.

Tony Teano:  What can older adults do to stay socially connected, especially now, given the COVID-19 pandemic?

Dr. Cudjoe: The last few years have been difficult for everyone. Due to a variety of factors the COVID-19 pandemic has been particularly burdensome for the health and well-being of older adults. My advice is to first stay safe practicing proper masking, physical distancing, and hand hygiene. Specifically, as it relates to staying socially connected, I believe its important for people to prioritize the practice of connecting with friends, families, and neighbors at regular and routine intervals. This could take the form of safe in-person interactions (masked, distanced, or outdoors), connecting using communication technologies (i.e. phone, Zoom, Facetime), or writing letters. At the core of this is nurturing our relationships.

Tony Teano: If people took away just one pearl of wisdom from your most recent research, what would you want that to be?

Dr. Cudjoe: Social isolation is not good for our bodies.

Tony Teano: What social isolation research is in the pipeline that you’re working on?

Dr. Cudjoe: I am actively working to understand what older adults think about social isolation and what they believe might be solutions to prevent or address this challenge.

 

By Anthony Teano, Communications Specialist

We are excited to launch our “COAH Champion” series this year, which is a fun and informal way to become better acquainted with our team members as both people and professionals. Our inaugural COAH Champion is Alden L. Gross PhD, Associate Professor with the Bloomberg School of Public Health.  Alden is known for his work in Alzheimer’s disease, and he has a keen knack for harmonizing (combining) data across multiple studies, including international studies of aging.  Let’s learn a little more about him!

 Tell us about your background, education, and path to COAH.

My admiration for psychology began in high school when I took a college level Psych 101 course at a local college. I majored in Psychology as an undergraduate student (University of Maryland, College Park), and that fascination with the mind coupled with my love for my own grandparents to fortify my interests in gerontology and mental health once I entered graduate school. I think that classes in graduate school began on a Friday and by 9am the following Tuesday, I was meeting with my future mentor, Dr. George Rebok. My interests were settled by then!

Why did you choose to go into this field of work?

I have always had an interest in mental health of older adults, specifically cognitive health. I spent a lot of time with grandparents while growing up. Professionally, there are a slew of measurement challenges in cognitive aging research that keeps me fascinated, including selection effects, measurement biases, and more.

What are you currently researching?

Cross-national comparisons of cardiovascular and socio-economic correlates of cognitive performance across high-income and low-income countries.

 What paper are you most known for or most proud of?

Can I give two? I’m going to give you two papers. The first is a 2012 paper called “An Exploratory Data Analysis of a Graduate Student (N=1).” I wrote this paper in one day on a weekend while in graduate school, after prodding from one of my doctoral defense committee members, Dr. Elizabeth Stuart. It was a fun reflection paper, and it even got an honest peer review. I was able to dig into 400 years of my own family history to illustrate some very basic concepts.

My second paper, and probably emblematic of what I am most known for, was a 2015 paper, “Effects of Education and Race on Cognitive Decline – An Integrative Study of Generalizability Versus Study-Specific Results.” This study was my first big integrative data analysis of multiple studies. It took a long time to write up, both because the methods were new and because I was harmonizing together 4 disparate cognitive aging studies. A lot of the work was interfacing with multiple groups of investigators and my own mentors. The revision with the Journal’s reviewers was actually pretty straightforward after all that hard work on the front end of writing this paper.

America and the world are celebrating the life of the late famed actress Betty White right now. As a tribute to her memory… and to quote Betty White’s Golden Girls character, Rose Nyland… “If you could invite any two people, living or dead, over for dinner, what would you eat?”

I would love to feast on steak and pasta.

Now, who would those people be?

I’m an introvert, so my approach to meeting people is to prepare a flamboyant initial greeting, and perhaps an opening conversation topic. But heaven help me, if I had to be part of a conversation for a whole dinner, especially after two years under a pandemic lockdown, I’d be terrified. And it’s just for one meal, right? I’d like some longer-term follow-up. I suppose a smattering of distant family ancestors would be nice to hear from.

What is the top item on your bucket list?

In the short term, I have a lot of lawn work to do and I need to get 2 important papers out the door. So those are 2 competing priorities. In the longer term, well I’m pretty content where I am on my current research and personal tracks. In terms of research, I really need to hire a postdoc and staff to help with expanding work.

Tell us about your hobbies…. What renews you?

My hobbies include building with Legos, spending time with my family (I have 2 toddlers roaming about), and yardwork!

Give us a short list of favorites….

• Author/Book–Academically, Denny Borsboom! In fiction, Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck.
• Song/Performer–Michael Jackson
• Actor/Film–Leonard Nimoy

Is there any additional fun fact to know and tell you’d like us to know about your home life, family, where you grew up, etc.?

I have been a treasurer of some organization or another for 64% of my life, since 1997. I’m a former world champion powerlifter and 4-time marathoner.  I was born here, grew up here, went to school here, and now I work here.

 

 

 

 

 

By Anthony Teano, Communications Specialist