Dr Harrison outlines research into connecting genetic data about Alzheimer’s disease risk with structural brain changes, as part of a wider project to use biomarkers to better stratify patients with Alzheimer’s Disease – and so ultimately enable more personalised treatments.
In this short expert talk, Dr Harrison presents an analysis of structural brain imaging data using Alzheimer’s polygenic risk scores. These polygenic risk scores calculate total risk across a number of small genetic changes (single nucleotide polymorphisms, or SNPs). She found that pathway-specific polygenic risk scores were associated with reduced cortical thickness changes even in young adults, suggesting that key changes behind Alzheimer’s Disease may start developing even early in life.
Dr Judith Harrison is a Wellcome Trust GW4 Clinical Academic Fellow at Cardiff University.
Our Clinical Academics in Training Annual Conference, or CATAC, offers early career researchers the chance to present work and receive feedback from senior panelists in a truly interdisciplinary setting. The conference gives clinical academics the chance to meet people from all areas of biomedical science, and share ideas from many different perspectives.
Read more about the 2018 meeting
https://acmedsci.ac.uk/grants-and-schemes/events/catac
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