Prof. Ab Brody collaborates on two major NIA-funded grants

Ab Brody, PhD, RN, FAAN, the Mathy Mezey Professor of Geriatric Nursing and associate director at HIGN at NYU Meyers, is a principal investigator on two new grants funded by the National Institute on Aging (NIA) of the National Institutes of Health to improve care for people
living with cognitive impairment and dementia.

The first grant is a $54.9 million, five-year cooperative agreement (1U19AG078105-01A1) to lead an 80-site randomized factorial embedded pragmatic clinical trial to improve the health and well-being of people living with dementia and their care partners who visit the emergency department. Visiting the emergency room is a critical event and an opportunity to address unmet health needs, so the overarching goal of this research is to turn an emergency room visit from a crisis into an opportunity.

The study will test three interventions—redesigning the emergency department experience, nurse-led telephone-based care, and transitional care delivered by paramedics—to reduce future emergency department visits and hospital admissions and increase person-centered
care. For this project, named ED-LEAD: Emergency Departments LEading the transformation of Alzheimer's and Dementia care, Prof. Brody will collaborate with Josh Chodosh, MD, MSHS, FACP, of NYU Grossman School of Medicine (the project’s contact principal investigator), Corita
Grudzen, MD, MSHS, of Sloan Kettering (principal investigator), and Manish Shah, MD, MPH, of the University of Wisconsin (principal investigator). Prof. Brody will lead the intervention using nurse-led telephone-based care, implementing the evidence-based transition and palliative care program he developed for Aliviado Dementia Care. Additionally, NYU Meyers’ Dan David, RN, PhD, will serve as a site-PI for the telephonic arm implementation at NYU.

The second grant is a $4.1 million, 5-year project (1R01AG079175-01) to refine an artificial intelligence-based approach that leverages electronic health records in order to reduce dementia screening disparities in racial and ethnic minoritized communities. The researchers will use machine learning, a type of artificial intelligence, to identify diverse older adults at risk for cognitive impairment based on their medical records. The team will then design and implement a randomized embedded pragmatic clinical trial with 70 primary care providers at NYU Langone Health in Brooklyn working as a team with a community health worker to engage patients and families in cognitive screening and supports to manage cardiovascular disease risk factors (hypertension, high cholesterol, diabetes) that increase the risk of cognitive decline through health education and providing the supports necessary to ameliorate the effects of social determinants of health.

The project is led by Narges Razavian, PhD (contact principal investigator) of NYU Grossman School of Medicine and NYU Center for Data Science; John Dodson, MD, MPH, of NYU Grossman and Prof. Brody are principal investigators.