Laura Raffield, PhD (Assistant Professor, Genetics) has been awarded a new U01 grant from NIA for her project titled “Proteomic biomarkers of incident cognitive impairment in Black and White adults”.
Black adults in the U.S. have a disproportionately higher risk of Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias (ADRD) compared with non-Hispanic White adults. Disparities in cardiometabolic risk factors and diseases and social determinants of health (including increased exposure to discrimination, lower levels of education, and higher poverty levels, which increase ADRD risk) likely contribute to this disparity, but exact mechanisms are unknown. This projects hypothesizes that inflammation may be a key feature linking cardiometabolic and social determinants of health disparities with the risk of incident cognitive impairment and dementia. Dr. Raffield proposes to test this hypothesis through systemic analysis of the circulating proteome with risk of incident cognitive impairment and trajectories of cognitive function in a large biracial population from the REasons for Geographic and Racial Differences in Stroke (REGARDS) study. REGARDS is a longitudinal cohort of 30,239 non-Hispanic Black and White adults across the contiguous U.S. with pre-existing genome-wide genotyping data and rich cardiovascular and neurocognitive phenotyping.