Nina Joyce
Brown University, RI·Public Health & Epidemiology
Driving takes memory, attention, judgment and good vision. Alzheimer's disease and related dementias slowly erode these abilities, so older adults with dementia face a higher risk of car crashes.
- Fields
Public Health & Epidemiology
Medicine & Clinical Research
- Topics
Alzheimer's disease
dementia
mild cognitive impairment
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jun 2027
What they work on
- Characterize how crash risk changes over many years in older drivers with mild cognitive impairment, Alzheimer's disease or related dementias, using 13 years of Medicare claims linked to New Jersey licensing and crash records.
- Identify sentinel points, the stages where crash risk is highest, and test how these points vary with individual characteristics, to show when safe-mobility interventions would work best.
- Evaluate how a motor vehicle crash changes later health, hospital and health care use, and the timing of long-term care for cognitively impaired older drivers, by following crash-involved drivers in linked Medicare data.
More about the research
Yet driving ability varies widely from person to person. Some people drive unsafely even before diagnosis, while others drive safely well into the mild-to-moderate stage. Little is known about how crash risk changes over the course of the disease, or how a crash changes a person's health afterward. Long-term data that follow drivers across years, including through mild cognitive impairment (MCI), the early stage that often comes before dementia, have been scarce.
Why it matters
Older drivers with Alzheimer's disease and related dementias, their families, and clinicians must decide when driving is still safe. By pinpointing when crash risk peaks and how crashes affect later health and long-term care needs, this work could help programs time driving assessments and safe-mobility support. That timing could lower crashes while preserving independence for as long as is safely possible.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Amy Rodriguez
Emory University, GA·Medicine & Clinical Research
Harmonize and scale behavioral and digital tools that measure lifestyle risk factors, so participants across the Alzheimer's Disease Research Center are described in consistent, detailed ways.
John Mafi
University of California-Los Angeles, CA·Medicine & Clinical Research
Build governance and infrastructure for rapid, reproducible evaluation of AI clinical decision-support tools for dementia, using UC Health Data Warehouse EHR and imaging data and the ATLAS genotyped biobank.
Raj Kumar
Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, NY·Public Health & Epidemiology·Early-career
Identify patient characteristics that predict the share of time older adults spend in different health care settings during the first year after post-acute TBI care admission, using Medicare claims linked to the National Trauma Databank.
The school
Brown University: 23 labs on PI Pages, $375M a year on research, 251 research doctorates a year.
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