Collaborative Endeavors

Scholar Spotlight: Dr. Julia Anglen Bauer, Environmental Pollutants & Alzheimer's Disease

Episode Summary

CCTS KL2 Scholar, Dr. Julia Anglen Bauer, is examining how environmental exposure impacts neurological outcomes across the lifespan, including how they may predict Alzheimer's Disease risk in the U.S. Latinx community.

Episode Notes

FEATURED RESEARCHER

Julia Anglen Bauer, PhD, MS
Assistant Professor, Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics
UIC School of Public Health

FEATURED PROJECT

The Hispanic Community Health Study/Study of Latinos
Site PI: Martha Daviglus, MD, PhD, MPH

Learn more about the CCTS's K Award program

Episode Transcription

0:00 Dr. Julia Anglen Bauer
It's so easy for us in environmental health to be like, well, you're doomed. You're exposed to all these things, right? But being able to say, “you know, yeah, a lot of chemicals are not good for you. But this is how you can change your trajectory.” That's huge.

19:00 Voice Over (VO), Lauren:
Welcome to Collaborative Endeavors, a podcast about how experts from different areas of research come together to tackle big health challenges, leading to better therapies and healthier communities. In this episode, we meet Dr. Julia Anglen Bauer, an assistant professor in the department of epidemiology and biostatistics in UIC’s school of public health. After pursuing an undergraduate degree in biomedical sciences and working in a molecular neuroscience laboratory, Dr. Bauer was connected with an epidemiologist who laid the foundation of her passion for medicine at the intersection of culture. This eventually led to a career examining how environmental exposure impacts neurological outcomes across the lifespan. Now, as a CCTS KL2 scholar, Dr. Bauer is taking a deeper look at how levels of pollutants stored in the body can predict Alzheimer’s risk decades before symptoms set in, with a specific focus on the U.S. Latinx population.

1:19 Dr. Bauer
What started my career as an epidemiologist was having this small project on lead exposure in children in Wayne County, Michigan. And it really built the foundation for all the work that I have done since. I went to UIC for my MS, and I wrote a master's thesis on this work looking at urinary mercury and risk of multiple sclerosis. I decided I wanted to be a leader in science, and knew I had to get a PhD. I applied, and I was fortunate enough to get into Boston University School of Public Health. I got a PhD in environmental health. My doctoral work and my postdoctoral work that I did at Dartmouth College in the School of Medicine focused on kids’ exposure to things like manganese and drinking water, arsenic and drinking water. And that brought me to back to UIC. It just feels like coming home, honestly, because I know so many of the faculty. I just feel like I was really able to integrate into research here and make an impact. So, I'm really excited to be at UIC and to really honored to have this opportunity through the KL2 to do some more training, which is all about Alzheimer's disease. 

What I'm looking at now, there's this really long latency between when pathology of neurodegeneration starts and when someone is diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease. And so, a lot of the cohorts looking at neurodegeneration, they start when people are already diagnosed. It's tough because there's not a cure for Alzheimer's disease yet, right? And without effective treatments, there's an urgent need for research targeting modifiable risk factors during early stages of disease. And you know, the pathological hallmark of AD is the abnormal aggregation of amyloid beta, which you may have heard about. And this aggregation of amyloid beta really initiates a cascade of pathological events that leads to signs of Alzheimer's disease decades later. So, exposure to neurotoxicants across the life course can remain in the body for a long time. This is true of things like persistent organic pollutants. It's kind of a long word, but we call it POPs in the environmental health field. Things like DDT, lots of different organic chlorine pesticides, things like industrial chemicals that are called polychlorinated biphenyls, and they accumulate in our body, especially in fat tissue.

We can measure these stored chemicals in the body, and they stay in our body so long that we're really able to estimate exposure decades before Alzheimer's disease even occurs. If I take a blood sample from someone, we can say that exposure occurred, on average, 10 to 20 years before we're taking that sample. So, it really allows us to think about the relationship of these persistent chemicals and how they may be related to Alzheimer's disease. And so, the overall goal of this project is to investigate the relationship between exposure to these persistent organic pollutants and Alzheimer's disease biomarkers among racially diverse Latinx communities in the United States.

5:21 VO: 
Approximately 7 million people in the United States are currently living with Alzheimer’s Disease, and this number is projected to nearly double by 2060. The Latinx community faces an even higher risk of developing the disease. Dr. Bauer highlighted the significant extent of these disparities.

5:39 Dr. Bauer
We're talking about double, maybe even triple for some people, compared to older non Latinx whites. Latinos have a higher risk of Alzheimer's disease, and prevalence is expected to increase by 800% by 2060. We don't really know why there is a disproportionate burden, but it may involve the increased prevalence of cardiometabolic conditions such as diabetes and obesity in the Latino community, as well as other modifiable risk factors that may include exposure to environmental contaminants through diet and occupation. In general, what you find in environmental health research is the people that are most affected, or the people who have a higher risk of social determinants of health- things like being an ethnic minority, having lower socioeconomic status- can really contribute to their environmental health burden. You also have to think about people that come here from other countries in Latin America, they've had different exposure scenarios than the United States. They've had pesticides that were in commerce longer than we did, such as DDT. So, it's definitely something that we need to consider in terms of how we treat our Latino patients that are aging.

7:21 VO: 
An ongoing study at UIC, The Hispanic Community Health Study or Study of Latinos, led locally by Dr. Martha Daviglus, is helping power Dr. Bauer’s research on this community. You can find additional information about this study and Dr. Daviglus in the show notes.

7:34 Dr. Bauer:
It's the largest health study of Latinos in the United States. It spans San Diego, Chicago, the Bronx and Miami. And within this large study they're really able to capture the experience of a diverse, rich history of Latinos across the United States. This is the study that I'm able to use really looking at these persistent organic pollutants and endogenous hormones. And there's another study in San Diego that I reached out to that have done an incredible amount of neurocognitive and brain imaging work. How I developed my idea is to put two of these ancillary studies together and think about how these persistent organic pollutants impact neurodegeneration with both brain images and then blood tests for these different hallmarks of Alzheimer's disease.

8:42 VO: 
As stated early on, there is no cure for Alzheimer’s Disease, and without robust therapeutics, millions of individuals and their families will continue to suffer both physically and emotionally. Dr. Bauer explained how this research might pave the way for preventative strategies or early interventions that could be used before symptoms manifest.

9:04 Dr. Bauer:
With this kind of research, we're thinking about not only primary prevention but secondary intervention studies as well. You could do dietary interventions that these kinds of chemicals they're in meat products, they're in dairy. I mean, simply changing diet could be helpful. Doing some intervention work like that, I think in the long term would be really impactful and rewarding. And I know that it's so easy for us in environmental health to be like, well, you're doomed. You're exposed to all these things, right? Environmental scientists are the people that you don't want to take to lunch. We're going to tell you a thousand ways why you're going to die from different things that you eat. But being able to say, “you know, yeah, a lot of chemicals are not good for you. But this is how you can change your trajectory.” That's huge. So powerful to your health and empowering to individuals.

10:03 VO: 
A highlight of the KL2 award is the extensive mentoring support provided to the junior faculty. Dr. Bauer described her mentor team and how they are helping her develop as a translational scientist.

10:18 Dr. Bauer:
I'm really thankful to have so many incredible scientists on this mentoring team. They are all doing incredible things in their own field, and I think they're going to complement one another in terms of how they mentor me, specifically, and what they'll bring to the research that I'm working on. My primary mentor is Mary Turyk. She's a professor in epidemiology and biostatistics, and she really brings a wealth of knowledge of the persistent organic pollutants measurement and environmental epidemiology research. She's really dedicated her career to measuring persistent organic pollutants in a variety of different communities, as well as metals. Then my co-mentor is Orly Lazarov. She is an amazing professor of neuroscience in the department of anatomy and cell biology at the University of Illinois Chicago, and she's also the director of an NIH-funded T32 program that's training in the biology and translational research on Alzheimer's disease and related dementia. What she adds is this animal model piece and understanding the pathogenesis of Alzheimer's disease. I mean, she's a pioneer in the field of neurogenesis and Alzheimer's disease. Dr. Rob Sargis, he's really focused on persistent organic pollutants and metals and thinking about this from a translational perspective, both in animals and clinical outcomes. Having him on the team really adds a lot about thinking about how to improve human health and crossing the bridge between animal and human studies. One person that is going to be playing a pivotal role in my mentorship is David Bennett. He is the director of the Rush Alzheimer's Disease Center. He has several different human cohorts on Alzheimer's disease in the Chicago area, and then also in in Brazil. 

12:39 VO: 
Rounding out Dr. Bauer’s team is Dr. Marc Weisskopf, a professor in the Department of Environmental Health and Occupational Sciences at Harvard University

12:55 Dr. Bauer:
I've known Marc for a long time, he's served as a collaborator before in the research that I did at Dartmouth. He does work that spans the life course, which is what I'm getting at as well. He has work in looking at environmental risk factors for autism in in Israel. He has work in different mixed metals exposure in miners and ALS. So really spanning this work from neurodevelopment to neurodegeneration, and he's trained as an environmental epidemiologist as well as a PhD in neuroscience. So for me, he's training me in a way that I think will give me foresight into how I want to lay out my career. Specifically, the kinds of skill sets that an environmental epidemiologist can have. I can't do it all, and I realize that I need collaborators, right? And hopefully my mentors will be my lifelong collaborators in in this endeavor.

14:03 VO: 
Dr. Bauer spoke to the unique nature of environmental toxicology and how this study hopes to identify and share models that can help other researchers draw associations across complex chemical and biological datasets.

14:23 Dr. Bauer
I think there's a lot of ways that this work can be built upon thinking about environmental mixtures and not just persistent organic pollutants, which are very complicated. The kinds of models that we're going to be using, some of them will be quite novel and allow you to compare associations across very correlated data. Because we're not in a bubble, right? In the real world, we're exposed to thousands of chemicals, and how do we account for that? How do we think about that? It's an area that's very exciting in our in the environmental health field. I think in that regard, people could use the models that that I'll be publishing on to think about different mixtures of exposures. It wouldn't even necessarily have to be environmental health exposures; they could be something like multiple proteins that you measure in blood.

15:29 VO: 
As our conversation neared its conclusion, Dr. Bauer shared some thoughts on the trajectory of her research career and the ways in which she would like to make an impact on our communities.

15:40 Dr. Bauer:
This KL2 award really set the foundation for my mission to uncover critical windows of environmental exposures that impact neurodevelopment. And now I'm going to be going into early markers of neurological disease and thinking about the interface between exposures in the environment, and the human body is dynamic across life stages. I feel like this work that that I'm doing will really impact Alzheimer's disease risk and lay the foundation for thinking about midlife as a critical window for Alzheimer's disease pathology. I see this project as being the foundation for my career. With this particular project, it's really linking environment and neurodegeneration and a community that I want to work in. I see my work going into gene-environment interactions. So, thinking about people that are at a higher genetic susceptibility to diseases and how environmental exposures can really enhance disease trajectories in these susceptible individuals. I want to work with people that have environmental justice concerns, people that this work is really impactful in their lives, being able to change not only the pathological mechanisms that we've been talking about in terms of blood markers and chemicals, but also how to help communities live healthier lives. And maybe that looks like working more with people that do community translation work and being able to really clean up communities that that need help, that maybe are overlooked, and really making a difference for people across life, from kids all the way through the elderly.

17:50 Voice Over:

Collaborative Endeavors is written and produced by me, Lauren Rieger, on behalf of the Center for Clinical and Translational Science (AKA the CCTS) at the University of Illinois Chicago. 

To learn more about Dr. Julia Bauer and the CCTS’s KL2 CATS and CATS affiliate program, visit the links in our show notes.

The CCTS is supported by the National Institutes of Health’s National Center for Advancing Translational Science through their Clinical and Translational Science Award. Opinions expressed by guests of the show are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of myself, the CCTS or our funding agencies.

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