The goal of our research is to identify promising and personalized targets of prevention and intervention to prolong older adults’ health span and to improve risk stratification and prognostication of persons living with burdensome geriatric syndromes, such as multimorbidity, frailty and dementia.
Photo: PrivateMD specialized in geriatric medicine at the Catholic University of Rome, with a PhD in geriatric epidemiology from Karolinska Institutet. I am currently an Assistant Professor in Geriatric Medicine at the Aging Research Center of Karolinska Institutet.
By recognizing the aging process as a complex and heterogeneous phenomenon, our primary goal is to identify clinically relevant health phenotypes in the older population. By decomposing and combining meaningful health domains – including disease, physical and cognitive functioning – we look for robust models to group people in homogeneous classes. Multimorbidity, frailty, disability and dementia are some of the geriatric syndromes we exploit to this end. These phenotypes can simultaneously serve as targets for personalized prevention and intervention, as well as function as metrics for risk stratification. Led by Davide Liborio Vetrano , much of our research is devoted to the understanding of the biological, clinical and psychosocial determinants of geriatric syndromes, as well as their impact on one’s future health trajectory.
More specifically, our research group – in collaboration with several Swedish and international researchers – focuses on the following research areas:
Multimorbidity is defined as the co-occurrence of multiple diseases in the same individual, and is often the trigger of complex clinical profiles, including frailty and dementia. In our group, great emphasis is given to the understanding of systematic clustering of diseases in the same individuals. Specific aspects investigated by us are:
Frailty is a clinical syndrome characterized by an increased susceptibility to minor stressors, highly associated to reduced survival and poor functioning. By applying novel analytical strategies, our group is strongly focused on the following aspects:
Multimorbidity, frailty, sarcopenia, disability and dementia are among the most burdensome and prevalent syndromes affecting the older population. By exploiting a selected large panel of blood-based biomarkers, analyzed alone or in combination, we aim to:
Health trajectories of older adults can be shaped, among the others, by the occurrence of acute events that include infections, cardiovascular accidents and traumatic injuries. Our group is interested in untangling the following specific aspects:
Older adults living with complex combinations of clinical and functional impairments are frequent users of healthcare services. While maintaining the main focus on the different combination of clinical and functional phenotypes, our aims include the identification of risk profiles for:
Several data sources have been used and are currently used by our group, including population-based studies (SNAC-K, NEAR), Nordic Countries National Patient Registers, and InterRAI data from several European, North American and Asian countries.
Aging Research Center, Department of Neurobiology, Care Sciences and Society, Tomtebodavägen 18 A, Solna, SE-171 65 Solna, Sweden
Aging Research Center, Department of Neurobiology, Care Sciences and Society, Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, SE-171 77, Sweden
Davide Liborio Vetrano group's current research is fully funded through research grants obtained in national and international competitions.
