Ethan Cicero
Emory University, GA·Public Health & Epidemiology·Early-career
Alzheimer's disease and related dementias (ADRD) are a public health priority, but much of what is known about who gets them comes from studies that were never designed to include people from under-resourced communities. That includes adults who use male or female hormones, such as hormone replacement therapy.
- Fields
Public Health & Epidemiology
Medicine & Clinical Research
Social Science
- Topics
Alzheimer's disease
dementia
cognitive aging
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Nov 2028
What they work on
- Examine the epidemiology of Alzheimer's disease and related dementias among middle-aged and older adults from under-resourced communities, including people receiving hormone replacement therapy, using Kaiser Permanente electronic health record data from the STRONG study.
- Compare dementia prevalence and risk across community subgroups, such as natal females and natal males, to determine whether outcomes differ within under-resourced populations.
- Explore, through qualitative interviews with a community-based sample, how psychosocial stressors such as social rejection, isolation, negative public attitudes and economic instability may influence dementia risk and cognitive impairment.
- Develop and pilot test a data collection protocol that objectively assesses cognitive function, psychosocial stressors, and dementia risk and protective factors in a cohort of middle-aged and older adults, as groundwork for a full prospective study.
More about the research
As a result, basic questions remain open: how common dementia is in these groups, whether risk differs across subgroups, and whether psychosocial stressors, such as stress-related health conditions, negative public attitudes, social rejection and isolation, and economic instability, contribute to that risk. This K23 career development project sets out to fill those gaps while building the applicant's skills in longitudinal statistics, qualitative and mixed methods, cognitive assessment, and community-engaged research that involves community members throughout the process.
Why it matters
Dementia risk is poorly documented among middle-aged and older adults from under-resourced communities, including those who use hormone therapy, so clinicians have little evidence to guide screening or counseling for these patients. By measuring how often dementia occurs in these groups and identifying stress-related factors tied to cognition, the work could inform clinical practice and provide a tested protocol for larger studies of brain health in populations that prior dementia research has largely missed.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Adovich Rivera
Northwestern University, IL·Public Health & Epidemiology
Measure the prevalence and incidence of cardiometabolic conditions and cardiovascular disease by sexual orientation, using linked Kaiser Permanente Research Bank surveys and electronic health records.
Medellena Glymour
Boston University, MA·Public Health & Epidemiology
Estimate how low-risk drinking, unhealthy drinking and alcohol use disorder each affect dementia risk, triangulating across ten cohorts, including Kaiser Permanente records and the UK Biobank, using doubly robust and instrumental variable methods.
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.
The school
Emory University: 70 labs on PI Pages, $1.2B a year on research, 286 research doctorates a year.
Reach out
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