Rebecca Gottesman is Senior Investigator and Stroke Branch Chief at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Before joining NINDS, she was Professor of Neurology and Epidemiology at

Johns Hopkins University Johns Hopkins University (Johns Hopkins, Hopkins, or JHU) is a private university, private research university in Baltimore, Maryland. Founded in 1876, Johns Hopkins is the oldest research university in the United States and in the western hem ...

. Gottesman completed a B.A. in Psychology at Columbia University (1995), an M.D. at Columbia University (2000), and a Ph.D. in Clinical Investigation at Johns Hopkins University (2007). She is a Fellow of the American Neurological Association (2012) and a Fellow of the American Heart Association (2015). Her research, funded primarily by the

National Institutes of Health The National Institutes of Health, commonly referred to as NIH (with each letter pronounced individually), is the primary agency of the United States government responsible for biomedical and public health research. It was founded in the late ...

, focuses on the vascular contribution to cognitive impairment and dementia, including

Alzheimer's disease Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a neurodegeneration, neurodegenerative disease that usually starts slowly and progressively worsens. It is the cause of 60–70% of cases of dementia. The most common early symptom is difficulty in short-term me ...

, and she uses brain imaging within cohorts such as ARIC to understand a mechanism for a vascular impact on Alzheimer's Disease. In a study published in '' JAMA'', she linked heart risks to the brain plaques of Alzheimer's, finding that compared to people with no midlife risk factors, suffering from obesity, smoking or having high cholesterol, high blood pressure or diabetes had an 88 percent increased risk of elevated levels of plaques, a hallmark of Alzheimer's. Those with two or more risk factors had triple the risk.

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