Race Against Dementia Fellow
University of Cambridge / Mayo Clinic
Background: After completing her undergraduate degree in Psychology at the National University of Singapore, Audrey worked as a research assistant and Clinical Research Coordinator at the National Institute of Neuroscience in Singapore. Then Audrey went on to complete her PhD in psychiatry at the University of Cambridge. Most recently Audrey has completed her postdoctoral qualification at the Old Age Psychiatry Group at Cambridge.
Research: Biomarkers are signals from the body that can tell doctors and researchers about what is going on in the brain, without directly looking at it. Biomarkers can detect dementia.
New biomarkers are really important to make sure that dementia is detected early, giving patients more opportunities for interventions and potential treatments.
When a person has Alzheimer’s disease, two harmful proteins build-up in the brain and cause the symptopms we associate with the disease – a decline in memory and thinking ability.
A healthy brain can clear away this toxic build-up of proteins. They are normally drained away in the fluid that surrounds the blood vessels in the brain. However, in Alzheimer’s disease this drainage system seems to stop working and areas of fluid build up.
Audrey’s research will investigate whether the fluid build-up in these spaces is also connected to the toxic proteins that are known to cause Alzheimer’s. If they are connected, then simple brain imaging of these fluid spaces could be used as a biomarker to detect the early onset of Alzheimer’s Disease.
