Dr. Anja Leist;
Credit: © Yaph
Associate professor and researcher Dr. Anja Leist, from the University of Luxembourg, has received a Starting Grant from the European Research Council (ERC) amounting to €1.5 million to support her work on dementia.
The grant was awarded to the social sciences researcher for her research on dementia and cognitive impairment in older ages. In total she will receive €1.5 million over five years to build a research team and lead her research project "CRISP" - “Cognitive Aging: From Educational Opportunities to Individual Risk Profiles”. The project aims to provide comprehensive knowledge and techniques to identify risk factors and people at risk of dementia, in order for them to benefit as early as possible from behavioural interventions. Her project is strongly linked to computational sciences.
Dementia, which manifests itself through deterioration in memory, thinking, behaviour and the ability to perform everyday activities, affects roughly 50 million people worldwide and almost 10 million people in Europe. Pathologies of dementia, such as Alzheimer’s disease, have devastating effects on people and families and represent a great challenge and cost for caregivers and health systems. Despite this, there is currently no treatment to reverse or cure cognitive impairment.
As such, CRISP has two missions: learning more about how inequalities determine cognitive ageing and using machine learning to capture the complexity of cognitive evolution. Regarding the first, Dr. Anja Leist has commented: “Innate abilities and parental background, but also external factors such as education, social environment, gender equality and professional development shape to what extent we can realise the potential of our brain. During our lifetime, these factors contribute to what we call building up cognitive reserve, meaning a kind of cognitive ‘fitness’ or the ability to improvise and find new ways to do the things we need to do. This cognitive reserve helps us in time to buffer or delay cognitive decline.” By quantifying the role of contextual inequalities related to education and gender, research results should guide policymaking in these areas.
As for the second part of CRISP, the research team aim to step up statistical models currently in use to identify people at risk with low-cost, non-invasive procedures with new machine learning techniques. The team believe that this unlikely combination is in fact the key to capture the complexity of cognitive decline. As such, the new statistical models should be able to help health professionals better predict the cognitive evolution of a person at risk. Persons at high risk of dementia can then be supported to make those changes in their lives that are necessary to remain stable or to significantly buffer a cognitive pathology.
Dr Anja Leist, nominated as Associate Professor at the University, specialises in social epidemiology, in particular linked to social inequalities and gerontology. Being a Fellow of the Gerontological Society of America, she volunteers in a worldwide network, the World Young Leaders in Dementia, and organised Dementia Awareness Workshops in Luxembourgish secondary schools, teaching teenagers how to recognise dementia and interact with people affected by it.
