Dr Naaheed Mukadam on ethnic inequalities in dementia
Dr Naaheed Mukadam is an Associate Professor in the Division of Psychiatry. Her work specialises on older people, as well as ethnic inequalities in dementia diagnosis and care.
Dr Naaheed Mukadam's current work focuses on the inequalities related to ethnicity when it comes to dementia. Regarding the motivations behind her work, she said:
"So much of what we know about dementia comes from studies in predominantly white people in relatively affluent settings so it is important to study more diverse groups. I hope that by studying dementia in diverse groups, we can gain a better understanding of how and why dementia develops in some people and not others and this could lead to better understanding of disease mechanisms and even potentially new treatments in the future."
Dr Mukadam has also done extensive work studying the link between music and memory, particularly within the South Asian community, which she discusses in this video:
Biography
Dr Mukadam completed her Medical Sciences undergraduate degree at Cambridge University with an intercalated BA in Experimental Psychology. She then studied Clinical Medicine at the University of Oxford and trained in general medicine and surgery at Oxford and Newcastle.
She completed her psychiatric training on the Royal Free Psychiatric Training rotation and obtained her CCT in Old Age Psychiatry in 2013. Dr Mukadam obtained a doctoral research training fellowship from the NIHR to design and test an intervention to encourage South Asian people to seek help earlier for dementia.
During her PhD, Dr Mukadam has collaborated on a number of studies, continuing her interest in inequalities related to ethnicity and expanding her research interests to include the epidemiology of dementia. Dr Mukadam's postdoctoral work is focused on using inter-ethnic epidemiology to find new ways of preventing and treating dementia.