Danielle Haley
Boston University, MA·Public Health & Epidemiology
As cannabis becomes legal in more places and stronger products become easier to buy, its health risks for older adults are a growing concern. People living with HIV (PWH) tend to be frailer than people without HIV.
- Fields
Public Health & Epidemiology
Medicine & Clinical Research
Computer Science
- Topics
cannabis
people living with HIV
antiretroviral therapy
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Mar 2031
What they work on
- Determine whether cannabis use disorder is associated with new falls, fractures, delirium and dementia, and with HIV viral suppression and antiretroviral therapy adherence, in about 180,000 Veterans Aging Cohort Study patients.
- Test whether these associations generalize to a non-veteran population, the Mount Sinai HIV cohort, and explore how state cannabis legalization changes them.
- Estimate the causal effect of self-reported past-year cannabis use on falls, fractures, delirium and dementia in about 9,000 surveyed veterans, using target trial emulation, which mimics a randomized trial with observational data.
- Build NLPWH, a natural language processing tool that detects cannabis use in clinical notes, by retraining the NLPREOP algorithm, and validate it with cannabis biomarkers, self-report and chart review.
More about the research
This may make them more vulnerable to harms such as falls, fractures, delirium and dementia, and to problems with antiretroviral therapy (ART), the daily medicines that keep HIV under control. Higher-potency cannabis also carries a greater risk of cannabis use disorder (CUD), addiction to cannabis. Electronic health records (EHRs) hold large amounts of relevant data, but cannabis use is often recorded only in free-text clinical notes.
Why it matters
This work could provide evidence on the medical harms of cannabis for aging people with and without HIV, including falls, dementia and failure of HIV treatment. The validated text-mining tool may help health systems quickly estimate cannabis use among their patients, even where screening is not routine. It could also supply data to guide policies on screening, diagnosing and treating cannabis use disorder.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Anne Black
Yale University, CT·Public Health & Epidemiology
Measure how time to a medically significant fall relates to current and cumulative methadone dose among VA patients who started methadone for opioid use disorder between 2016 and 2025.
Selen Bozkurt
Emory University, GA·Medicine & Clinical Research
Translate clinical trial protocol eligibility text into computable phenotypes and query packages tied to standard vocabularies, and validate them against expert references and prescreening logs.
Zachary Mannes
Columbia University, NY·Public Health & Epidemiology·Early-career
Test whether cannabis use disorder is a risk factor for later opioid use disorder, opioid-related hospitalization, and fatal or non-fatal overdose. Use a longitudinal cohort built from VHA electronic health records.
The school
Boston University: 26 labs on PI Pages, $784M a year on research, 630 research doctorates a year.
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