UF College of Nursing faculty member Hwayoung Cho, PhD, recently received an NIH grant for more than $500,000 for a four-year study examining disparities in the risk of dementia among people living with HIV aged 50 and older. The study aims to develop an early warning system to identify those at high risk of dementia.
For this study, Cho will leverage artificial intelligence, machine learning, and natural language processing with large-scale real-world data from electronic health records and claims data through the OneFlorida+ Clinical Research Network, linked with social determinants of health data sources.
The study, funded by the National Institute on Aging, is titled: “Disparities in Risk of Dementia among People Living with HIV using Real-World Data.”
With advances in antiretroviral therapy, half of the people living with HIV are over the age of 50 and have a 60% increased risk of developing dementia. While there is no cure for dementia, early detection can provide interventions to delay the onset of dementia, including Alzheimer’s disease and Alzheimer’s disease-related dementia. Through this study, Cho will generate real-world evidence of HIV and dementia and develop actionable strategies to reduce disparities and promote healthy longevity for older people with HIV.
In clinical workflows, clinical decision support encompasses a wide range of tools for enhancing decision-making. As part of this proposed research, Cho will prototype an early warning system that can be implemented into the electronic health record systems as a platform that can serve as the prediction model-based clinical decision support tool for the risk of dementia in HIV.
Research reported in this publication was supported by the National Institute on Aging of the National Institutes of Health under Award Number K01AG090118. The content is solely the authors’ responsibility and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.
A career development and research mentoring team, including Jiang Bian, PhD; Robert Cook, MD, MPH; Ronald Cohen, PhD; Ramzi Salloum, PhD; and R. Murray And Annabel Davis Jenks Endowed Professor Gail Keenan, PhD, RN, FAAN; will work closely with Cho in the areas of biomedical informatics, epidemiology, clinical psychology, medicine, and nursing.