Robert Turner
Duke University, NC·Neuroscience
Black Americans face nearly twice the risk of Alzheimer's disease and related dementias as white Americans. Yet Black people are underrepresented in brain health research, including studies of former American football players.
- Fields
Neuroscience
Medicine & Clinical Research
Public Health & Epidemiology
- Topics
Alzheimer's disease
dementia
repetitive head impacts
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Feb 2029
What they work on
- Test whether repetitive head impacts and traumatic brain injury from American football are linked to worse later-life memory, thinking and psychiatric symptoms in Black male former players compared with unexposed Black men.
- Examine links between football head impacts and MRI measures of brain structure and blood biomarkers of amyloid-beta, p-tau (Alzheimer's proteins) and neurodegeneration in Black former players.
- Assess whether early-life contextual risk factors, measured with the Adverse Childhood Experiences and SHARELIFE questionnaires, raise risk, reduce resilience or mediate the effects of head impacts on brain outcomes.
More about the research
Repeated hits to the head (repetitive head impacts) and traumatic brain injury from contact sports are linked to later memory problems, mood and behavior changes, and brain shrinkage. Childhood and life circumstances, such as education quality, neighborhood and economic conditions, may also shape how resilient the brain is to such injuries.
Why it matters
The study is expected to produce a new data set on head impacts and early-life conditions in older Black men, a group largely missing from this research. The findings could clarify racial disparities in late-life brain outcomes after contact sports. They could also help clinicians detect and diagnose neurodegenerative disease more accurately in individual Black patients.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Tracy A. Butler
Weill Medical College of Cornell University, NY·Neuroscience
Confirm, using additional complementary measurement methods, the preliminary finding that traumatic brain injury reduces brain cerebrospinal and interstitial fluid clearance, including the glymphatic pathway, in patients imaged within 14 days of injury.
Laura B Zahodne
University of Michigan, MI·Psychology
Follow MCAP participants for a third assessment and expand the cohort, then use latent growth curve modeling to test whether neighborhood socioeconomic status predicts differences in cognitive decline between Black and White older adults.
Richard MacLehose
Tulane University of Louisiana, LA·Public Health & Epidemiology
Measure brain structure, brain function, cognition and blood-based markers related to Alzheimer's disease in adults aged 40–55 from the Bogalusa, NGHS and Princeton lipid cohorts.
The school
Duke University: 61 labs on PI Pages, $1.6B a year on research, 417 research doctorates a year.
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