Alexa S. Beiser, PhD
Professor, Biostatistics
Biography
Alexa Beiser has been on the faculty at Boston University School of Public Health since 1985, engaged in teaching and collaborative public health research; she co-developed the doctoral program in biostatistics; co-directed the biostatistics program from 2000-2004, and served as Associate Chair for Education from 2015-2018. She formerly taught and coordinated the sections of Introduction to Statistical Computing. For more than twenty-five years, Dr. Beiser has served as the lead biostatistician for the Framingham Heart Study (FHS) neurology group, examining risk factors and prevalence and incidence of clinical and sub-clinical neurological outcomes including MRI and PET measures of brain structure, cognitive performance, dementia, Alzheimer’s disease, stroke, Parkinson’s disease, and epilepsy. Dr. Beiser currently leads the FHS neurology group data management team, responsible for surveillance and tracking of incident dementia, for supervision of recruitment of participants for various grant-funded studies, and for management of data collected at FHS as well as those measured or processed at other institutions (e.g., brain MRI or PET scans); and the FHS neurology group biostatistics team of six biostatisticians. Decades of examining risk factors for neurological diseases has naturally led to studying factors associated with accelerated brain aging. Dr. Beiser has coauthored FHS publications relating risk factors including midlife vascular factors, plasma homocysteine, plasma leptin levels, cardiac index, red blood cell omega-3 fatty acids, metabolic dysregulation, visceral fat, air pollution; serum brain-derived neurotrophic factor; and insulin-like growth factor 1, to measures of brain aging. Dr. Beiser also has made use of the richness of the multigenerational Framingham data to relate documented parental dementia and stroke to offspring stroke, cognitive performance, and MRI measures of brain structure. In investigations of clinical neurological endpoints, she has applied competing risk analyses and has also been able to investigate temporal trends in prevalent and incident neurological disease due to the availability of event surveillance over many decades. In all these studies, Dr. Beiser plays a key role in project conceptualization, is responsible for supervision of statistical data management, analysis, and interpretation of results, and contributes to manuscript preparation and critical review.
Other Positions
- Professor, Neurology, Boston University Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine
- Investigator, Framingham Heart Study
- Associate Chair, Biostatistics, Boston University School of Public Health
- Boston Medical Center
Websites
Education
- Boston University, PhD
- University of California, San Diego, MA
- University of California, Santa Cruz, BA
Publications
- Published on 9/22/2023
Pase MP, Pinheiro A, Rowsthorn E, Demissie S, Hurmez S, Aparicio H, Rodriguez-Lara F, Gonzales MM, Beiser A, DeCarli C, Seshadri S, Romero JR. MRI Visible Perivascular Spaces and the Risk of Incident Mild Cognitive Impairment in a Community Sample. J Alzheimers Dis. 2023 Sep 22. PMID: 37742645.
Read at: PubMed - Published on 9/12/2023
Vered S, Beiser AS, Sulimani L, Sznitman S, Gonzales MM, Aparicio HJ, DeCarli C, Scott MR, Ghosh S, Lewitus GM, Meiri D, Seshadri S, Weinstein G. The association of circulating endocannabinoids with neuroimaging and blood biomarkers of neuro-injury. Alzheimers Res Ther. 2023 Sep 12; 15(1):154. PMID: 37700370.
Read at: PubMed - Published on 8/28/2023
Weinstein G, O'Donnell A, Frenzel S, Xiao T, Yaqub A, Yilmaz P, de Knegt RJ, Maestre GE, Melo van Lent D, Long M, Gireud-Goss M, Ittermann T, Frost F, Bülow R, Vasan RS, Grabe HJ, Ikram MA, Beiser AS, Seshadri S. Nonalcoholic fatty liver disease, liver fibrosis, and structural brain imaging: The Cross-Cohort Collaboration. Eur J Neurol. 2023 Aug 28. PMID: 37641505.
Read at: PubMed - Published on 8/22/2023
Melo van Lent D, Mesa HG, Short MI, Gonzales MM, Aparicio HJ, Salinas J, Yuan C, Jacques PF, Beiser A, Seshadri S, Jacob ME, Himali JJ. Association between dietary inflammatory index score and incident dementia: results from the Framingham heart Study offspring cohort. medRxiv. 2023 Aug 22. PMID: 37662354.
Read at: PubMed - Published on 8/21/2023
Fongang B, Satizabal C, Kautz TF, Wadop YN, Muhammad JAS, Vasquez E, Mathews J, Gireud-Goss M, Saklad AR, Himali J, Beiser A, Cavazos JE, Mahaney MC, Maestre G, DeCarli C, Shipp EL, Vasan RS, Seshadri S. Cerebral small vessel disease burden is associated with decreased abundance of gut Barnesiella intestinihominis bacterium in the Framingham Heart Study. Sci Rep. 2023 Aug 21; 13(1):13622. PMID: 37604954.
Read at: PubMed - Published on 7/3/2023
Pase MP, Harrison S, Misialek JR, Kline CE, Cavuoto M, Baril AA, Yiallourou S, Bisson A, Himali D, Leng Y, Yang Q, Seshadri S, Beiser A, Gottesman RF, Redline S, Lopez O, Lutsey PL, Yaffe K, Stone KL, Purcell SM, Himali JJ. Sleep Architecture, Obstructive Sleep Apnea, and Cognitive Function in Adults. JAMA Netw Open. 2023 Jul 03; 6(7):e2325152. PMID: 37462968.
Read at: PubMed - Published on 6/28/2023
Dhaynaut M, Grashow R, Normandin MD, Wu O, Marengi D, Terry DP, Sanchez JS, Weisskopf MG, Speizer FE, Taylor HA, Guehl NJ, Seshadri S, Beiser A, Daneshvar DH, Johnson K, Iverson GL, Zafonte R, El Fakhri G, Baggish AL. Tau Positron Emission Tomography and Neurocognitive Function Among Former Professional American-Style Football Players. J Neurotrauma. 2023 Aug; 40(15-16):1614-1624. PMID: 37282582.
Read at: PubMed - Published on 6/15/2023
Bouzid H, Belk JA, Jan M, Qi Y, Sarnowski C, Wirth S, Ma L, Chrostek MR, Ahmad H, Nachun D, Yao W, Beiser A, Bick AG, Bis JC, Fornage M, Longstreth WT, Lopez OL, Natarajan P, Psaty BM, Satizabal CL, Weinstock J, Larson EB, Crane PK, Keene CD, Seshadri S, Satpathy AT, Montine TJ, Jaiswal S. Clonal hematopoiesis is associated with protection from Alzheimer's disease. Nat Med. 2023 Jul; 29(7):1662-1670. PMID: 37322115.
Read at: PubMed - Published on 5/1/2023
Scollard P, Choi SE, Lee ML, Mukherjee S, Trittschuh EH, Sanders RE, Gibbons LE, Joshi P, Devine S, Au R, Dams-O'Connor K, Saykin AJ, Seshadri S, Beiser A, Aparicio HJ, Salinas J, Gonzales MM, Pase MP, Ghosh S, Finney R, Mez J, Crane PK. Ceiling effects and differential measurement precision across calibrated cognitive scores in the Framingham Study. Neuropsychology. 2023 May; 37(4):383-397. PMID: 37276135.
Read at: PubMed - Published on 5/1/2023
Levine DA, Chen B, Galecki AT, Gross AL, Briceño EM, Whitney RT, Ploutz-Snyder RJ, Giordani BJ, Sussman JB, Burke JF, Lazar RM, Howard VJ, Aparicio HJ, Beiser AS, Elkind MSV, Gottesman RF, Koton S, Pendlebury ST, Sharma A, Springer MV, Seshadri S, Romero JR, Hayward RA. Associations Between Vascular Risk Factor Levels and Cognitive Decline Among Stroke Survivors. JAMA Netw Open. 2023 May 01; 6(5):e2313879. PMID: 37195662.
Read at: PubMed
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