Reflections on dementia research and ageing societies

A.V. Hill Lecture

Professor Carol Brayne CBE

• 27 October 2025, 18:00 – 19:00
• Bristol-Myers Squibb Lecture Theatre A.V. Hill Lecture

Upcoming event Booking Recommended In-person Lecture Michaelmas Term A.V. Hill Lecture

• Event cost: Free
• Disabled access?: Yes
• Booking required: No

Share:

• Tweet

Overview

Dementia is a topic of considerable public interest. How empirical evidence has contributed to this societal awareness and indeed fear will be covered in this talk. It will span research from the 1980s when not much was understood about dementia up to contemporary perspectives. The focus will be on the epidemiological and public health evidence base, and how this relates to the results published from clinical and lab based research. The findings from UK and other high income countries of reduced age specific prevalence (%) will be explored, and the implications of results from brain based studies that dementia is not inevitable in the presence of ‘alzheimer’ type changes. The role of inequalities, risk varying across countries and time and our knowledge about protective factors have strengthened during recent years, and the balance of high risk with whole population approaches to reducing risk for society will be considered.

Program

Biography

Carol is a medically qualified epidemiologist and public health academic. She has pioneered the study of dementia in populations. Carol’s principal area of research has been longitudinal studies of the health of older people, with a focus on the brain, from a public health perspective. This included pioneering work bringing biology to populations including the creation of brain banks for medical research from population studies. She held the Professorship of Public Health Medicine from 2001 to 2024 at the University of Cambridge, and is now Professor Emeritus and Senior Visiting Fellow in the Department of Psychiatry.

After joining Cambridge in 1985 during her MRC training Fellowship after gaining MRCP and MSc Epidemiology, Carol developed deep phenotyping in representative populations of older people including brain donation in both the Fens and Cambridge City (Cambridge City over 75 Cohort). She was research leader from 1989, later becoming lead principal investigator, in the Cognitive Function and Ageing Studies studies. A longitudinal multicentre study, this multidisciplinary population based set of studies has examined cognitive function and health in older people since the late 80s. Its results have informed national policy and now underpin our wider understanding of dementia: showing it can occur without the expected changes in brain pathology and that such changes, when they do occur, do not inevitably lead to dementia. And that, age for age, dementia is less common than it was 30 years ago.

She set up and for many years led the masters programme in Epidemiology at the University, as well as teaching and training for epidemiology and public health within the Department of Public Health and Primary Care. She was Head of Department from 1999-2001.

Alongside her Directorship of the Cambridge Institute of Public Health and, more recently, Co-directorship of Cambridge Public Health, selected positions that Carol has held include Faculty of Public Health’s Academic & Research Committee Chair, Royal College of Physicians’ Special Advisor for inequalities, National Institute of Health Research (NIHR) Senior Investigator (and emerita until 2025), National Institute of Health Research School for Public Health Cambridge University principal investigator, NIHR major investment themes leader and co-chair of the Alzheimer’s Society Research Strategy Council and Chair of Wellcome Trust Expert Reference Group for Population Health. She set up and led The Public Health of Ageing Research Unit at the University for decades, an involved team of specialised dementia and ageing population researchers whose work includes specific risk reduction trials, studies of ageing and technology, age-friendly cities, as well as the impact of ageing and dementia in the populations of low and middle-income countries. She is a member and co-deputy chair of the National Council on Bioethics of the United Kingdom bringing the perspectives of public health, neuroscience and medicine to the Council.

A fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences, Carol has been listed among the highest cited scholars in the world across all disciplines and was awarded a CBE for services to public health medicine in the Queen’s 2017 Honours.

---

A.V. Hill Lecture

Archibald Vivian Hill (1886-1977) FRS was an English physiologist, one of the founders of the diverse disciplines of biophysics and operations research. He shared the 1922 Nobel Prize in Phusiology or Medicine for his elucidation of the production of heat and mechanical work in muscles. Hill is regarded, along with Hermann Helmholz, as one of the founders of biophysics.

The first AV Hill Lecture was delivered in 2013 by Sir Leszek Borysiewicz, Vice Chancellor of Cambridge University.

---

Location