Director of the Center for Integrative Biology of the U. Mayor is a member of the Latin American network for research on dementia
12-02-2020
12-02-2020
Dr. Felipe Court is part of the Latin American and Caribbean Consortium on Dementia, whose objective is to carry out multicenter studies on aging and associated diseases in the population of Latin America and the Caribbean and to access national and international research funds.
Latin America has one of the highest prevalences of dementia in the world. One of the big problems for researchers is that most biomedical studies are carried out in the northern hemisphere, so there is a low representation of the Latin population. To reverse this situation, the Latin American and Caribbean Consortium on Dementia (LAC CD) was formed, made up of ten countries in the region.
From Chile, one of its members is the director of the Center for Integrative Biology at the Universidad Mayor (CIB), Dr. Felipe Court, who works on neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's .
"The idea is to be connected with other centers, clinics and universities that carry out studies on aging and associated diseases and increase the representation of Latinos in these studies, in order to make them more robust," he said.
Seven months after its creation, the consortium published its first joint paper in the journal Alzheimer's & Dementia, which establishes the action plans for a regional work in the study of dementia, which includes the identification of the genetic bases in America Latin, special variants, etc.
There are many differences between the Latin population and the rest of the world, for example, risk factors associated with genetic heterogeneity. It also highlights the social issue, where the probability of having dementia is directly associated with education and nutrition. Thus, poorer countries or countries with deficient social policies will have a higher prevalence of dementia and Alzheimer's. In this sense, the incidence of dementia in Latin America has been increasing in recent years, unlike the trend in first world countries, where this incidence has remained stable or even decreased.
For the director of the CIB, this network is “a great initiative and we, as a center, see it as a starting point to develop large-scale projects. Together with this consortium, we are evaluating projects where we can see the risk factors for developing dementias in different Latin American populations, including Chile. In addition, we will be able to observe genetic and environmental variants in the development of neurodegenerative diseases associated with aging ".
In addition, LAC CD will seek to generate a work network that allows it to effectively access international funds that support research projects in Latin America, in such a way as to contribute to discovering new risk factors, both genetic and environmental, in the population of the region.
