Richard MacLehose
Tulane University of Louisiana, LA·Public Health & Epidemiology
Black Americans face a higher risk of Alzheimer's disease and related dementias than other groups. One possible reason is that heart and blood-vessel risks build up over a lifetime.
- Fields
Public Health & Epidemiology
Medicine & Clinical Research
Neuroscience
- Topics
Alzheimer's disease
dementia
cardiovascular risk factors
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Apr 2028
What they work on
- 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.
- Test whether cardiovascular risk factors measured in childhood (ages 3–19), such as obesity, glucose, lipids and blood pressure, predict poorer brain health in midlife among Black and white participants.
- Examine how geographic and socioeconomic exposures in childhood, such as food quality, green space, education quality and pollutants, contribute to racial differences in midlife brain health.
- Build and share a harmonized open data resource across the I3C cohorts linking early-life risk factors to dementia-related brain health.
More about the research
Obesity, high blood sugar, high cholesterol and high blood pressure can begin to damage blood vessels in childhood, and even before birth. That damage may later feed hidden Alzheimer's-type changes in the brain by middle age, decades before any symptoms. Little data exist to test this idea in Black populations, because few studies have followed the same people from childhood into midlife.
Why it matters
The study could help identify Black and white children whose cardiovascular risk puts them at higher risk of dementia decades later. Identifying these children could allow earlier intervention and help narrow racial disparities in Alzheimer's disease. The findings may also inform changes to pediatric clinical practice guidelines.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Yang Pan
University of Illinois Chicago, IL·Public Health & Epidemiology·Early-career
Test whether mitochondrial DNA copy number and heteroplasmy (mutation load), measured in blood at two midlife time points, predict cognitive decline in Bogalusa Heart Study participants, with validation in the TOPMed cohort.
Tanika Kelly
University of Illinois Chicago, IL·Public Health & Epidemiology
Recruit 300 diverse adults with and without diabetic kidney disease and collect blood and environmental exposure data, such as metals and social conditions, every year for three years.
Robert Turner
Duke University, NC·Neuroscience
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.
The school
Tulane University of Louisiana: 17 labs on PI Pages, $276M a year on research, 187 research doctorates a year.
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