Via Maryland Today / By Gina Driscoll
A UMD-led initiative will expand access to data and create an AI-assisted tool to help navigate findings across disciplines.
University of Maryland researchers have been awarded a five-year, $3.16 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to expand a multi-institutional research network examining how experiences early in life may influence dementia risk later in adulthood.
The funding, administered by the National Institute on Aging, will support the next phase of the Network on Early-Life Determinants, Biosocial Pathways and Dementia (EdDem), led by School of Public Policy Professor Katrina Walsemann, the Roger C. Lipitz Distinguished Chair in Health Policy and co-director of the Southern Population Aging Research Center (SPARC). The project is co-led by social policy Professor Pamela Herd of the University of Michigan and Sanjay Asthana, a clinician and geriatrician at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
EdDem brings together more than 120 researchers across the country from the social, behavioral, population and biomedical sciences. It was established in 2022 with an initial focus on understanding the relationship between education and dementia, including the social, behavioral and biological factors that may explain that connection.
The new grant broadens the investigation to examine childhood experiences, family circumstances, neighborhood environments and other early-life conditions. The expanded research team will explore how those dynamics interact with factors throughout adulthood, including socioeconomic circumstances, health behaviors, inflammation, genetic susceptibility and biological markers associated with Alzheimer’s disease.
“We tend to think of dementia as a disease that affects older adults,” said Walsemann, “but the factors that shape risk may begin much earlier in life.”
In addition to advancing research, the grant will strengthen EdDem’s support for investigators, particularly those in the early stages of their careers, with pilot research funding, grant proposal reviews, networking, training, sustained mentorship and multidisciplinary collaboration.
“I am especially excited about creating opportunities for early-career investigators to find collaborators, develop new ideas and get the mentoring and support they need to build successful research programs,” said Walsemann.
The funding will also support the creation of a Data Resource and Sharing Hub led by UMD Associate Research Professor Heide Jackson of the Maryland Population Research Center. The hub will help researchers navigate study design, data management, restricted-data access and statistical analysis, and also develop a publicly available catalogue of reviewed analytic code for major longitudinal aging studies.
The NIH award also funds the new Brain Development-to-Dementia Tool, an AI-assisted resource designed to help researchers navigate evidence from fields that do not always use the same terminology, measures or conceptual frameworks. The tool will be developed and tested in collaboration with researchers at Stanford University, the University of Wisconsin-Madison and UMD, and will help investigators integrate and visualize evidence on early-life pathways to dementia, identify gaps in existing research and use those insights to develop new hypotheses and cross-disciplinary studies.
