Lauren Rutter
Indiana University, IN·Psychology·Early-career
Alzheimer's disease begins changing the brain more than 20 years before memory problems appear, yet it is often diagnosed late. Spotting early drops in thinking ability could let people receive treatment sooner.
- Fields
Psychology
Neuroscience
Public Health & Epidemiology
- Topics
Alzheimer's disease
cognitive decline
early detection
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through May 2029
What they work on
- Examine how cognitive performance, perceived stress and psychiatric symptoms relate across individuals and over time, in an existing sample from the Indiana Alzheimer's Disease Research Center.
- Develop natural language processing algorithms, computer methods that analyze text, to detect and quantify risk factors for depression in midlife and older adults.
- Track older adults' daily thinking, emotions and stress using ecological momentary assessment (repeated phone check-ins) with validated mobile cognitive tasks, to test whether real-world data detect early cognitive decline.
More about the research
Depression in older adults may be a risk factor for this decline, possibly acting through stress. However, no one knows yet whether depression is an early sign, a cause, or a result of cognitive decline. Current tests are also done in the lab and can miss small day-to-day changes. This career development project aims to build a 'naturalistic' approach that detects cognitive decline from everyday behavior and real-world data.
Why it matters
Simple, low-burden phone-based and language-based measures could help clinicians spot early cognitive decline and preclinical Alzheimer's disease in older adults before memory loss sets in, opening a window for earlier treatment. Clarifying how depression and stress relate to cognitive aging may also point to mechanisms that could be targeted.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Adam Roth
Oklahoma State University, OK·Social Science
Characterize the daily social interactions and activities of older adults in rural and urban areas, using surveys and ecological momentary assessments, which are brief repeated check-ins during everyday life.
Matthew D Grilli
University of Arizona, AZ·Neuroscience
Test whether smartphone-tracked autobiographical thoughts in clinically normal older adults relate to plasma Alzheimer's biomarkers and to resting-state connectivity of the default network, brain regions targeted early in the disease.
Evan Jordan
Indiana University, IN·Public Health & Epidemiology
Determine where, when, and what environmental stressors are experienced by 300 urban and 300 rural Indiana residents with mild cognitive impairment, using the STRIVE smartphone app, GPS tracking, and smartwatch data.
The school
Indiana University: 21 labs on PI Pages, $897M a year on research, 438 research doctorates a year.
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