DoP Seminar - Dr Jeannie Leoutsakos

The September Division of Psychiatry hybrid meeting will be held on Wednesday 17th January at 3pm.

Venue: UCL Campus

About the Speaker

Dr Jeannie Leoutsakos, John Hopkins School of Medicine

Biosketch:

Jeannie-Marie Leoutsakos is an Associate Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, director of her department's Biostatistics and Methodology Core, core faculty of the Richman Family Precision Medicine Center of Excellence for Alzheimer's Disease, nd co-director of the analytic core for JHU Resource Centers for Minority Aging Center (RCMAR).  Her own methodological work involves the interface between Biostatistics and Psychiatry, including planning and analysis of clinical trials, and the use of latent variables methods which allow for the modeling of risk factors and treatment response as a function of patterns of symptoms or shapes of trajectories over time.  

Talk Abstract:

The association between dementia and neuropsychiatric symptoms (NPS) including depression, agitation, and delusions and hallucinations is well established.  This talk will focus on how the study of trajectories of these NPS can inform two important questions:  1) What do these patterns tell us about the pathogenesis of dementia and how to prevent it?   2) How does this help us identify and test treatments for NPS?  Dr. Leoutsakos will discuss how the majority of individuals who develop dementia experience NPS prior to any cognitive diagnosis, and how latent variable modeling of NPS in cognitively normal elderly can be used to identify those at greatest risk for dementia. Cross-sectional analyses often suggest that African Americans have great severity of NPS in the context of dementia, but she will present analyses to test whether this finding can be explained by delayed access to evaluation and diagnosis.  Finally, she will discuss work currently underway to estimate causal effects of antidepressant use on affective symptoms and risk of progression from MCI to dementia, and development of a smart-phone based method for collection of daily NPS data.