ARC ROLE

Dementia Research Fellow

PROFESSIONAL ROLE

Consultant Geriatrician, UCLH and St Pancras hospitals

Honorary Clinical Research Fellow, MRC Unit for Lifelong Health and Ageing, University College London

EXPERTISE AND INTERESTS

Alex is a consultant geriatrician clinically based at UCLH and St Pancras hospitals, and academically at the MRC Unit for Lifelong Health and Ageing (UCL). He has a background in population epidemiology and machine learning prediction techniques. His specific interest is in the decompensation of cognition in the context of reduced baseline function, specifically delirium in patients with cognitive impairments including dementia. Alex's aim is to better understand, diagnose and manage patients living with dementia, improving short to long term outcomes while emphasising the need to understand priorities from the context of the patient.

From clinical practice, Alex has observed different outcome patterns following acute illnesses in patients living with dementia: depending on their baseline cognition, the size of the acute insult and the severity of any superadded confusional state, patients may present with diverging long-term cognitive and survival trajectories. By better articulating these decompensation subtypes, cross-sectionally during acute illness and longitudinally by including baseline data, he hypothesises that it is possible define discernible clinical clusters of delirium risk, long-term survival risk and likely trajectories of cognitive deterioration in patients living with dementia. We will therefore be better informed in clinical decision making in employing the most appropriate approaches for each patient – who should be referred for the most intense rehabilitation, and when should we anticipate a more palliative conversation with patients and families?

Alex joins ARC North Thames as part of the Dem Comm programme, coordinated by ARC Wessex. Alex's project will focus on acute care of people living with dementia.