Psychopharmacology and Neuroendocrinology in Alzheimer's Disease
Dr. Sanjay Asthana is a physician-scientist whose research focuses on clinical psychopharmacology and neuroendocrinology of gonadal steroids and cholinergic drugs in Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and healthy aging. His team uses neuroimaging and biofluid biomarkers to examine the potential effects of hormones on AD pathobiology.
Dr. Asthana also leads clinical trials and collaborates extensively on studies of preclinical biomarkers of AD. He is the founding director of the Wisconsin Alzheimer's Disease Research Center.
Active Projects
Dr. Asthana leads a project involving the world-renowned Wisconsin Longitudinal Study (WLS) that targets the life course, intergenerational transfers and relationships, family functioning, physical and mental health, and morbidity and mortality from late adolescence through midlife and old age in 10,000 randomly selected sample of high-school graduates of Wisconsin in 1957.
This project involves over 6,000 WLS participants and will examine the potential relationship between lifelong exposure to various socioeconomic and environmental factors and risk and resilience to AD and related disorders. It will be the first to demonstrate the effects of social determinants on AD risk in a randomly selected, population-based population.
Future potential studies, pending NIH review and funding, relate to the effects of testosterone on neuroimaging and biofluid biomarkers of preclinical AD in older hypogonadal men at risk for AD.