Cécilia Samieri

Bordeaux Population Health research center INSERM U1219, France

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Title

The food exposome of brain aging and dementia: epidemiological approach

Abstract

Healthy nutrition is a critical determinant of healthy brain aging. However, a challenge remains to decipher the very specific aspects of nutrition most likely to modify substantially the risk to develop brain aging pathologies. As dementia develops silently over years before diagnosis, epidemiology is a unique tool to characterize early risk factors and long-evolving brain aging pathways through biomarkers. Epidemiology also allows to study complex exposures such as nutrition with a holistic perspective – the food exposome, from candidate nutrients to a global approach of diet patterns. Moreover, there is substantial inter-individual variability in the metabolic and neurobiological responses to diet and deciphering such heterogeneity - the foundation of precision medicine – with precision epidemiology may help refine nutritional interventions for the prevention of dementia. Hence, the development of high-throughput technologies applied to biological matrices has fostered characterization of the molecular architecture underpinning such heterogeneity across individuals, allowing to refine knowledge on how specific elements of the food matrix may impact pathways leading to dementia. A critical step in precision epidemiology is also to interrogate effect modification by some biological modulators that may define individualized vulnerability profiles. This presentation will provide an overview of current epidemiological knowledge on the relation of the food exposome with brain aging and dementia and review several novel methods for population research in diet, including how to better study diet patterns and vulnerability factors in nutritional epidemiology by exploration of the food metabolome. The final goal is to find for each individual the optimal pathway-modifying diet prescription likely to modulate brain aging trajectories and avoid dementia.

Biosketch

As a director of research at INSERM (the French National Institute for Health), Cécilia Samieri leads a group on the “exposome of brain aging and dementia” in the Bordeaux Population Health research center. She studies the epidemiology of brain aging, with the aim of understanding how the environment influences the etiology of dementia, developing original approaches to address lifestyle and brain health with a holistic vision, from diet patterns to molecular markers of the exposome. Trained as a veterinary and then as a neuro-epidemiologist in Bordeaux and as a Fulbright post-doctoral fellow at Harvard School of Public health in Boston, she leveraged large French and US cohorts to evidence associations of healthy diets and optimal cardiovascular health, with healthy brain aging. She served as academic co-chair of the Alzheimer’s Association's Professional Interest Area group on Nutrition and Metabolic Diseases from 2019 to 2021. In 2022 she has set up a new population-based cohort of your seniors after age 55 as a unique tool to evaluate, with high-throughput molecular and imaging-based epidemiology, the exposome and early signs of neuropathology. The overarching goal is to inform next-generation public health policies, integrating behaviors with contextual factors for the precision prevention of cognitive aging.