Three Boston University faculty members have received a $2.8 million grant from the National Institute on Aging to create a Center on the Demography and Economics of Alzheimer's Disease and Related Dementias. The center, called the Boston University-Quantitative Population Science and Healthy Cognitive Aging Research Program, or BU-SHARP, launches this fall under Dr. Maria Glymour, chair and professor of epidemiology at the School of Public Health, Dr. Andrew Stokes, associate professor of global health at SPH, and Dr. Deborah Carr, A&S Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the College of Arts & Sciences.
The center's focus is prevention, and specifically prevention in the groups that carry the heaviest dementia burden. A growing body of evidence suggests that changing health and lifestyle factors could delay or prevent a meaningful share of Alzheimer's and related dementia diagnoses. That matters because new cases in the United States are projected to double by 2060.
Figuring out which prevention strategies actually work has proven harder than it sounds. According to the researchers, the field is slowed by methodological problems, gaps in available data, and research teams that lack the mix of disciplinary expertise needed to study particular populations and settings. BU-SHARP is designed to address that by pulling together scholars from demography, sociology, economics, epidemiology, and data science rather than leaving each field to work in isolation.
BU-SHARP will be the 18th such center in the country, joining a network of NIA-funded academic hubs that support cognitive aging research and connect investigators across fields. The infrastructure model here is worth noting: rather than funding a single trial or dataset, the NIA is investing in the collaborative machinery that prevention research depends on, with results likely to emerge over years rather than months.