Determining the vascular contributions to sex differences in cognitive decline and dementia

Understanding the progression of Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias is important for making clinical care decisions, developing personalized medicine approaches, and making large-scale predictions for future healthcare burdens. Models are an important tool both for estimating risk and protective factors of transitions in disease states in large, longitudinal data sets and for projecting individual and population-level trajectories. In this project, we combine multistate transition models analyzing transition patterns in cognitive status and important dementia risk factors in the University of Michigan Memory and Aging Project with microsimulation models that project those patterns forward, estimating and quantifying uncertainty around future trajectories. We will investigate the potential impact of interventions on modifiable dementia risk factors, such as hypertension and diabetes.