Rebecca England Amariglio, Ph.D.

Rebecca Amariglio

2017

Massachusetts Neuropsychological Society

Winner

Rebecca England Amariglio, Ph.D.

Harvard Medical School

Dr. Rebecca Amariglio’s area of interest is to improve our ability to identify and track the earliest stages of Alzheimer’s disease (AD), by developing and optimizing sensitive instruments that measure subtle cognitive and functional changes. Beginning in fellowship, her research began to focus on the utility of subjective cognitive concerns as a risk factor for cognitive impairment in older individuals. Over the last five years, she has been awarded the New Investigator Research Grant by the Alzheimer’s Association and the NIH Career Development Award to further the study of subjective cognitive concerns and their association with objective cognitive testing, AD biomarkers, and longitudinal outcomes in clinically normal older individuals.

Concurrent with Dr. Amariglio’s work, the concept of Subjective Cognitive Decline (SCD) as an at-risk stage for AD has gained significant recognition in the field of aging and dementia research. Dr. Amariglio is a member of the Subjective Cognitive Decline International Working Group that has worked toward developing universal criteria for defining SCD. This group recently published a paper in collaboration with the Alzheimer’s Disease Cooperative Study, validating a specific questionnaire that measures subjective cognitive concerns of both the participant and a study partner. Her group found that the Cognitive Function Instrument tracked with longitudinal clinical and cognitive decline, as well as APOE carrier status. This study is highly relevant to AD secondary prevention trials that are in need of sensitive functional measures to quantify long-term clinical benefit in participants who are at preclinical stages of disease. Additionally, Dr. Amariglio and her group have published a paper in Neurology demonstrating that greater subjective memory complaints corresponds with advancing stages of preclinical AD. Dr. Amariglio is co-investigator of the Harvard Aging Brain Study.

Dr. Amariglio is a clinical neuropsychologist and a research investigator at Massachusetts General Hospital and the Center for Alzheimer Research and Treatment at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. She has also been recently promoted to Assistant Professor in Neurology at Harvard Medical School. She earned her doctorate in clinical psychology from the University of New Mexico, completing a pre-doctoral fellowship at the Yale School of Medicine.