Publications by authors named "Gallacher J"

Background: Early life adversity has been shown to have long-lasting detrimental effects on a variety of biopsychosocial outcomes. Early adversity and its consequences may directly or indirectly affect cognitive aging and increase the risk of developing dementia in older age. Investigating the biopsychosocial outcomes associated with early adverse experiences is essential to inform health policies and promote healthy cognitive development across the life course.

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A major challenge facing the biomedical community is creating and sustaining high-quality research environments. A literature search identified five common themes underlying biomedical research environments comprising collaboration, data access, user-led innovation, data provenance and a deep commitment to public and scientific benefit. Club theory is used to develop a model describing social structures that underpin these themes.

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Background: Despite numerous past endeavors for the semantic harmonization of Alzheimer's disease (AD) cohort studies, an automatic tool has yet to be developed.

Objective: As cohort studies form the basis of data-driven analysis, harmonizing them is crucial for cross-cohort analysis. We aimed to accelerate this task by constructing an automatic harmonization tool.

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Childhood adversity and adulthood adversity affect cognition later in life. However, the mechanism through which adversity exerts these effects on cognition remains under-researched. We aimed to investigate if the effect of adversity on cognition was mediated by distress or neuroticism.

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Introduction: The Dementias Platform UK (DPUK) Data Portal is a data repository bringing together a wide range of cohorts. Neurodegenerative dementias are a group of diseases with highly heterogeneous pathology and an overlapping genetic component that is poorly understood. The DPUK collection of independent cohorts can facilitate research in neurodegeneration by combining their genetic and phenotypic data.

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The association between residential greenness and allostatic load (AL), a marker of composite physiological burden and predictor of chronic disease, remains understudied. This study comprised 212,600 UK Biobank participants recruited over 2007 and 2010 at the baseline. Residential greenness was modeled as the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) from high spatial resolution (0.

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Population-based prospective studies, such as UK Biobank, are valuable for generating and testing hypotheses about the potential causes of human disease. We describe how UK Biobank's study design, data access policies, and approaches to statistical analysis can help to minimize error and improve the interpretability of research findings, with implications for other population-based prospective studies being established worldwide.

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Background: The Patient Health Questionnaire Anxiety and Depression Scale (PHQ-ADS) provides a reliable and valid measure of concomitant depression and anxiety. However, research on its psychometric efficiency and optimal scale length using item-response theory (IRT) has not been reported. This study aimed to optimize the length of the PHQ-ADS scale without losing information by discarding items that were a poor fit to the IRT model.

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Although dementia research has been dominated by Alzheimer's disease (AD), most dementia in older people is now recognised to be due to mixed pathologies, usually combining vascular and AD brain pathology. Vascular cognitive impairment (VCI), which encompasses vascular dementia (VaD) is the second most common type of dementia. Models of VCI have been delayed by limited understanding of the underlying aetiology and pathogenesis.

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Objectives: To understand associations between the subjective experience of cognitive decline and objective cognition. This subjective experience is often conceptualised as an early step towards neurodegeneration, but this has not been scrutinised at the population level. An alternative explanation is poor meta-cognition, the extreme of which is seen in functional cognitive disorder (FCD).

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With rapid urbanization, built environment has emerged as a set of modifiable factors of cardiovascular disease (CVD) risks. We conducted a systematic review to synthesize evidence on the associations of attributes of urban built environment (e.g.

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Background: Understanding and quantifying the differences in disease development in different socioeconomic groups of people across the lifespan is important for planning healthcare and preventive services. The study aimed to measure chronic disease accrual, and examine the differences in time to individual morbidities, multimorbidity, and mortality between socioeconomic groups in Wales, UK.

Methods: Population-wide electronic linked cohort study, following Welsh residents for up to 20 years (2000-2019).

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There is common consensus that data sharing accelerates science. Data sharing enhances the utility of data and promotes the creation and competition of scientific ideas. Within the Alzheimer's disease and related dementias (ADRD) community, data types and modalities are spread across many organizations, geographies, and governance structures.

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Data discovery, the ability to find datasets relevant to an analysis, increases scientific opportunity, improves rigour and accelerates activity. Rapid growth in the depth, breadth, quantity and availability of data provides unprecedented opportunities and challenges for data discovery. A potential tool for increasing the efficiency of data discovery, particularly across multiple datasets is data harmonisation.

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Socio-economic status (SES) and biological aging are risk factors for dementia, including Alzheimer's disease, however, it is less clear if the associations with SES vary sufficiently across different biological age strata. We used data from 331,066 UK Biobank participants aged 38-73 with mean follow-up of 12 years to examine if associations between SES (assessed by educational attainment, employment status and household income) and dementia and Alzheimer's disease are modified by biological age (assessed by leucocyte telomere length: LTL). Diagnosis of events was ascertained through hospital admissions data.

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Background: Early detection of β-amyloid (Aβ) accumulation, a major biomarker for Alzheimer's disease (AD), has become important. As fluid biomarkers, the accuracy of cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) Aβ for predicting Aβ deposition on positron emission tomography (PET) has been extensively studied, and the development of plasma Aβ is beginning to receive increased attention recently. In the present study, we aimed to determine whether genotypes, age, and cognitive status increase the predictive performance of plasma Aβ and CSF Aβ levels for Aβ PET positivity.

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Background: A growing body of evidence shows differences in the prevalence of cardiometabolic syndrome (CMS) and dementia based on gender and ethnicity. However, there is a paucity of information about ethnic- and gender-specific CMS effects on brain age. We investigated the different effects of CMS on brain age by gender in Korean and British cognitively unimpaired (CU) populations.

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Persistent Hepatitis E Virus infection (HEV) is a rare but increasingly recognised condition in immunocompromised individuals. Untreated, this infection can rapidly progress to cirrhosis. Ribavirin is recommended as the first line treatment and the majority achieve sustained viral clearance.

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Introduction: An increasing proportion of global population is exposed to urban densification in an aging society. However, little is known of the role of residential density and urbanicity on the risk of developing dementia including Alzheimer's disease. We examined long-term associations between residential density and urbanicity and risks of incident dementia and Alzheimer's disease.

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Neurodegenerative diseases of the brain pose a major and increasing global health challenge, with only limited progress made in developing effective therapies over the last decade. Interdisciplinary research is improving understanding of these diseases and this article reviews such approaches, with particular emphasis on tools and techniques drawn from physics, chemistry, artificial intelligence and psychology.

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Article Synopsis
  • Research-ready data enhances the rigor and opportunities in scientific research by creating a unified data environment, particularly valuable for analyses involving multiple cohorts.
  • The C-Surv model was developed through stakeholder feedback and is designed with a structured approach based on 18 relevant data themes, using standard naming conventions for variables in longitudinal studies.
  • Implementing this common data model provides significant advantages, as shown by reduced data preparation times compared to specific cohort models, and aids in the efficient discovery and analysis of research data.
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Introduction: Multidomain interventions to address modifiable risk factors for dementia are promising, but require more cost-effective, scalable delivery. This study investigated the feasibility of the "Active Brains" digital behavior change intervention and its trial procedures.

Materials And Methods: Active Brains aims to reduce cognitive decline by promoting physical activity, healthy eating, and online cognitive training.

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Introduction: Mortality from liver disease is increasing and management of decompensated cirrhosis (DC) is inconsistent across the UK. Patients with DC have complex medical needs when discharged from hospital and early readmissions are common. Our aims were: (1) to develop a Decompensated Cirrhosis Discharge Bundle (DCDB) to optimise ongoing care and (2) evaluate the impact of the DCDB.

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The association between adversity and cognition varies according to the specific adversity, when the adversity was experienced, and the cognitive domains investigated. Disentangling the effect of adversity and the underlying mechanistic pathway is therefore difficult. The association between adversity (i.

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