All of this will also eventually culminate in my life’s work to intervene on those social and structural determinants to improve health for all!

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I’m excited to see the work from my dissertation get out there over the coming months, and to further build upon this work to illustrate the influence of the social and structural determinants of health on dementia.

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Not a typical post (🧵) on here, but just over 6 months ago, I successfully defended my dissertation alongside friends, family, my committee, and many loved ones. It was a wonderful day, and I have so many people to thank for their support over the past 3 years and more!

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I truly cannot thank this entire team enough for their help in getting this out! (@dusetzinas.bsky.social)

And a special thanks to my mentor, sponsor, and friend in this work, @uressien.bsky.social, for giving me the opportunity to lead this project after we first discussed it back in 2022!

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Our main finding was a narrowing of racial and ethnic disparities from 2010 to 2019! 📉

In other words, although Black and Hispanic beneficiaries had lower rates of receipt of ERBB2/HER2-targeted therapies than white beneficiaries in 2010, this disparity was no longer seen in 2019.

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To help answer this question, we designed a retrospective cohort study using the SEER–Medicare linked dataset, where the primary outcome was receipt of ERBB2/HER2-targeted therapies in the 12 months after diagnosis, by race and ethnicity.

So, what did we find? ⁉️

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Sharing a short thread here on our recent publication from earlier this month. This project was an incredible team effort, and truly would not have been possible without every co-author on this all-⭐ team!

Go give it a read here if interested: jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...

A short 🧵:

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📋‼️Honored to share this newly published article that I helped lead!

Cannot thank @uressien.bsky.social enough - he has served as a friend, mentor, and sponsor throughout! And the whole study team who this wouldn’t have happened without!🙏🏽

Will post a longer thread on the findings soon - stay tuned!

We’re finally there, y’all! I’ll be defending my final PhD dissertation next Friday, March 28th! Excited to see you on the other side of it!

What does this all mean? It affirms that where you live, the resources and opportunities available to you as a result, impacts your risk for dementia. It highlights the importance of grassroots initiatives and policy efforts to tackle SDoH - it brings this image to mind!

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Among cognitive measures, we saw strong relationships between ADI and the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA), the preclinical Alzheimer’s cognitive composite (PACC), and the mini-mental – similarly driven by the cognitively unimpaired participants 📉.

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Across cardiometabolic measures, we saw in bivariate analyses that ADI predicted systolic BP, HbA1c, and a composite cardiometabolic health index – and this was largely driven by our cognitively unimpaired participants 📈.

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We set out to look for how place-based SDoH affected cardiometabolic and cognitive measures associated with ADRD within the Wake Forest Alzheimer's Disease Research Center clinical core cohort, and used the Area Deprivation Index (ADI) as our predictor.

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About time for a reintroduction on here! 😊

I'm Sud, a 5th-year MD/PhD student @wakeforest.bsky.social and a tenant organizer in Winston-Salem, NC! My dissertation work looks at the impact of social determinants of health (SDoH) and structural racism on Alzheimer's disease and related dementias.

Coffee and latte art (on a budget)! I could talk about it forever haha

This is a cortado I made when I was making espresso-based drinks more regularly!