Stacy L. Andersen PhD

Assistant Professor, Geriatrics

72 E. Concord Street | (617) 353-2080
Stacy Andersen
Sections

Geriatrics

Biography

Stacy Andersen, PhD is a behavioral neuroscientist and co-director of the New England Centenarian Study. Her primary research interests lie in the study of exceptionally long-lived individuals and the ability of some to avoid or be more resilient to cognitive dysfunction to very old ages. Building on her research experience in running the day-to-day activities of 2 longitudinal studies of human longevity, the New England Centenarian Study (NECS) and the NIA-funded U-19 Boston Center of the Long Life Family Study (LLFS), her earliest work focused on the compression of morbidity and disability among centenarians and long-lived families. Historically, gerontologists and the lay public assumed that living longer was associated with an increased duration of age-related illnesses. Then, in 1980, Jim Fries proposed his compression of morbidity hypothesis, suggesting that as people live to the limit of human life span, they necessarily postpone or delay age-related diseases towards the end of life. She investigated this hypothesis in relation to cancer, normally associated with high mortality risk and documented a 17-year delay in the onset of cancer diagnoses compared with a national cancer database. Next, she published evidence that those truly near the limit of human life span, supercentenarians (age 110+ years), postpone not only morbidity but also functional and cognitive decline. The supercentenarians spend an average of the last 5 years of their lives with one or more age-related diseases whereas younger centenarians spend approximately 9 years with morbidity. These studies demonstrate that extremely long-lived individuals are models for disease-free aging that can help us learn more about health spans and successful aging.

Her current work in the area of exceptional aging research focuses on cognitive reserve and the maintenance of cognitive function into extreme old age. The ability of many long-lived individuals to avoid dementia sparked her interest in studying whether their family members have better cognition than their peers. She led an analysis of cognitive function among centenarian offspring in the New England Centenarian Study which revealed that they have a 46% lower odds of baseline cognitive impairment and were 35% less likely to become cognitively impaired over 8 years of follow up compared with referents without familial longevity. Similarly, in the Long Family Study, she was involved in studies revealing that family members from the offspring generation perform better on some tests of neuropsychological function than their spouses who do not have familial longevity. Assessment of more specific deficits in cognitive function consistent with Alzheimer’s disease revealed lower risk of impairment among individuals with familial longevity compared with their spouses. These findings led her to write a viewpoint article on the potential of centenarians to serve as models of resistance and resilience to Alzheimer’s disease which became the foundation of the multi-site U19 project called Resilience/Resistance to Alzheimer’s Disease in Centenarians and Offspring (RADCO). In addition to being a multiple PI of this project, she is the lead of the Phenotyping and Biospecimen Core, responsible for constructing and implementing protocols to identify cognitive “superagers” and comprehensively evaluating their brain function. She is also the lead investigator of Project 1 which aims to gauge levels of resilience to Alzheimer’s disease by integrating neuropsychological, blood biomarker, neuroimaging, and neuropathological data to understand whether the ability to avoid or cope better with pathological brain changes contributes to exceptional cognitive until the end of life.

Her other primary area of research focuses on methods of detecting subclinical cognitive changes. As an expert in the area of neuropsychological assessment and analyses, she plays a critical role in the development of neuropsychological testing protocols across longevity studies as well as the implementation of digital technologies to capture spoken language and motor function during test performance. On this novel forefront of digital neuropsychological assessment, she is currently involved in the development and analysis of digital markers of cognitive function. Using data collected with a digital pen on a test of psychomotor speed, she led research that showed patterns of change in performance speed that were related to specific physical and cognitive functions suggesting the ability to differentiate motor slowing versus cognitive slowing. Variations in written, as well as verbal, responses captured with digital technologies may prove to be sensitive, efficient, and objective markers of cognitive impairment beyond what can be captured by standard hand-scoring of test data. The hope is that these digital markers may be integrated into the technologies that we already use in our daily lives to capture changes in cognitive function as early as possible to prevent future decline.

Education

Neuroscience/Neurology, PhD, Boston University School of Medicine

Neuroscience/Neurology, BS, Brandeis University

Publications

Published on 7/21/2025

Xicota L, Cheng R, Barral S, Honig LS, Schupf N, Gu Y, Andersen S, Cosentino S, Zmuda J, Perls T, Province M, Lee JH. Utility of Polygenic Risk Scores in Families with Exceptional Longevity. medRxiv. 2025 Jul 21. PMID: 40778169.

Published on 7/18/2025

Li M, Song Z, Reed E, Karagiannis TT, Andersen S, Brent M, Mateusiak C, Acharya S, Jung WS, Liao S, Wojczynski MK, Feitosa MF, O'Connell JR, Montasser ME, Thorpe RJ, Arbeev K, Milman S, Tai A, Perls TT, Sebastiani P, Monti S. Whole blood transcriptional signatures of age and survival identified in Long Life Family and Integrative Longevity Omics Studies. bioRxiv. 2025 Jul 18. PMID: 40791342.

Published on 7/17/2025

Yang J, Amini S, Hao B, Park S, Karjadi C, San Souci L, Kolachalama VB, Cosentino S, Andersen SL, Au R, Ch Paschalidis I. Developing an accessible dementia assessment tool: Leveraging a residual network, the trail making test, and demographic data. J Alzheimers Dis. 2025 Sep; 107(1):128-145. PMID: 40676898.

Published on 7/11/2025

Wang L, Tanner K, Andersen SL, Cosentino S, Moghaddam VA, Daw EW, Anema JA, Lin SJ, Sandeep A, Province M, Wojczynski MK. Identification of novel protective loci for executive function using the trail making test part B in the Long Life Family Study. bioRxiv. 2025 Jul 11. PMID: 40672224.

Published on 7/4/2025

Bae H, Song Z, Ali A, Sasaki T, Tesi N, Lords H, Leshchyk A, Abe Y, Hirose N, Arai Y, Barzilai N, Weiss EF, Hulsman M, van der Lee S, van Schoor NM, Huisman M, Pijnenburg Y, van der Flier W, Reinders M, Holstege H, Milman S, Perls TT, Andersen SL, Sebastiani P. Increased genetic protection against Alzheimer's disease in centenarians. Geroscience. 2025 Jul 04. PMID: 40615639.

Published on 6/3/2025

Bae H, Song Z, Ali A, Sasaki T, Tesi N, Lords H, Leshchyk A, Abe Y, Hirose N, Arai Y, Barzilai N, Weiss EF, Hulsman M, van der Lee S, van Schoor NM, Huisman M, Pijnenburg Y, van der Flier W, Reinders M, Holstege H, Milman S, Perls TT, Andersen SL, Sebastiani P. Increased Genetic Protection Against Alzheimer's Disease in Centenarians. bioRxiv. 2025 Jun 03. PMID: 40501936.

Published on 5/28/2025

Sebastiani P, Reed E, Chandler KB, Lopez P, Lords H, Bae H, Costello CE, Au M, Deng LL, Li M, Xiang Q, Noh H, Pflieger L, Funk C, Rappaport N, Nygaard M, Short MI, Brent M, Monti S, Andersen SL, Perls TT. Robust Serum Proteomic Signatures of APOE2. bioRxiv. 2025 May 28. PMID: 40501769.

Published on 4/23/2025

De Anda-Duran I, Hwang PH, Drabick DA, Andersen SL, Au R, Libon DJ. Neuropsychological phenotypic characteristics in a cohort of community-based older adults: Data from the Framingham Heart Study. J Alzheimers Dis. 2025 Jun; 105(4):1447-1459. PMID: 40267270.

Published on 4/22/2025

Libon DJ, Swenson R, Langford DT, Cosentino S, Price CC, Lamar M, Emrani S, Au R, Andersen S, Chen MH, Ashendorf L, Thompson L. Precision neurocognition: An emerging diagnostic paradigm leveraging digital cognitive assessment technology. J Alzheimers Dis. 2025 Apr 22; 13872877251325725. PMID: 40262110.

Published on 1/5/2025

Xiang Q, Lok JJ, Roth N, Andersen SL, Perls TT, Song Z, Yashin AI, Mengel-From J, Patti GJ, Sebastiani P. Causal mediation analysis of the neuroprotection of APOE2 through lipid pathways. medRxiv. 2025 Jan 05. PMID: 39802799.

View full list of 91 publications.