Saima Hilal

My current research focuses on investigating the risk factors, aetiology, occurrence and prevention of aging related diseases in the elderly, with a particular focus on dementia, Alzheimer disease, vascular dementia, cardiovascular disease (CVD) and stroke. The main areas of my research are to elucidate the earliest signs of brain diseases, before clinical symptoms are present, and to understand how these lead to clinical manifestation of disease. Moreover, I am interested in preclinical signs that can be used to identify persons at highest risk of developing disease. I have also worked with the complex interaction between heart and brain connection. To this aim, I have used data from the large population-based studies in Singapore (Epidemiology of Dementia in Singapore study), Netherlands (Rotterdam Study), UK biobank, Sweden (H70 study) and Hong Kong (Risk Index for Subclinical brain lesions in Hong Kong). Also, I have used neuropsychological testing, blood-based biomarkers, genome-wide sequencing technologies, and recently advanced brain imaging (artificial intelligence). Not only am I interested in how these pre-clinical markers lead to clinical disease, I also want to disentangle the intricate relationships between these markers. A main focus of my research has been the use of MR-imaging to understand brain diseases. I have a high level of expertise on a wide range of structural and functional brain imaging markers and have extensively published on these in relation to brain aging, stroke cognition, dementia and cardiovascular disease (over 130 publications, with 90% in top 25% journals in respective fields).All publications can be found athttps://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=hilal+saima&show_snippets=off&sort=date