Alexa S. Beiser

About

Alexa S. Beiser, PhD, is a Professor of Biostatistics at Boston University School of Public Health. She has been on the faculty since 1985, engaging in teaching and collaborative public health research. Dr. Beiser co-developed the doctoral program in biostatistics, co-directed the biostatistics program from 2000 to 2004, and served as Associate Chair for Education from 2015 to 2018. She formerly taught and coordinated sections of Introduction to Statistical Computing. Her research primarily focuses on neurological outcomes and brain aging, with over twenty-five years of experience serving as the lead biostatistician for the Framingham Heart Study neurology group. Her work involves examining risk factors and prevalence of clinical and subclinical neurological conditions, including dementia, Alzheimer’s disease, stroke, Parkinson’s disease, and epilepsy, often utilizing MRI and PET measures of brain structure. Dr. Beiser leads the FHS neurology group data management team, overseeing surveillance, participant recruitment, and data analysis. Her research has explored various risk factors such as vascular health, plasma biomarkers, environmental exposures like air pollution, and genetic influences, relating them to measures of brain aging and neurological disease. She plays a key role in project conceptualization, supervision of data management, analysis, interpretation, and manuscript preparation.

Research topics

• Biology
• Medicine
• Genetics
• Internal medicine
• Bioinformatics
• Immunology
• Evolutionary biology
• Cancer research
• Neuroscience
• Demography

Selected publications

• New insights into the genetic etiology of Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias

  Nature Genetics · 2022 · 2403 citations

  Characterization of the genetic landscape of Alzheimer's disease (AD) and related dementias (ADD) provides a unique opportunity for a better understanding of the associated pathophysiological processes. We performed a two-stage genome-wide association study totaling 111,326 clinically diagnosed/'proxy' AD cases and 677,663 controls. We found 75 risk loci, of which 42 were new at the time of analysis. Pathway enrichment analyses confirmed the involvement of amyloid/tau pathways and highlighted mi…

  DOI

• Stroke genetics informs drug discovery and risk prediction across ancestries

  Nature · 2022 · 586 citations

  . Stroke genetic risk scores were predictive of ischaemic stroke independent of clinical risk factors in 52,600 clinical-trial participants with cardiometabolic disease. Our results provide insights to inform biology, reveal potential drug targets and derive genetic risk prediction tools across ancestries.

  DOI

• Cerebral small vessel disease genomics and its implications across the lifespan

  Nature Communications · 2020 · 206 citations

  White matter hyperintensities (WMH) are the most common brain-imaging feature of cerebral small vessel disease (SVD), hypertension being the main known risk factor. Here, we identify 27 genome-wide loci for WMH-volume in a cohort of 50,970 older individuals, accounting for modification/confounding by hypertension. Aggregated WMH risk variants were associated with altered white matter integrity (p = 2.5×10-7) in brain images from 1,738 young healthy adults, providing insight into the lifetime imp…

  DOI

• Clonal hematopoiesis is associated with protection from Alzheimer’s disease

  Nature Medicine · 2023 · 144 citations

  ), and Mendelian randomization analyses supported a potential causal association. We observed that the same mutations found in blood were also detected in microglia-enriched fraction of the brain in seven of eight CHIP carriers. Single-nucleus chromatin accessibility profiling of brain-derived nuclei in six CHIP carriers revealed that the mutated cells comprised a large proportion of the microglial pool in the samples examined. While additional studies are required to validate the mechanistic fi…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• De novo mutations across 1,465 diverse genomes reveal mutational insights and reductions in the Amish founder population

  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · 2020 · 110 citations

  ), which suggest that variation in DNM rate is significantly shaped by nonadditive genetic effects and the environment.

  DOI

Frequent coauthors

• Sudha Seshadri

  Framingham Heart Study

  3237 shared

• Jayandra J. Himali

  The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio

  1604 shared

• Ramachandran S. Vasan

  National Heart Lung and Blood Institute

  1527 shared

• Charles DeCarli

  University of California, San Diego

  1258 shared

• Philip A. Wolf

  1189 shared

• Claudia L. Satizábal

  Institute for Neurodegenerative Disorders

  1030 shared

• Rhoda Au

  Boston University

  804 shared

• Matthew P. Pase

  Monash University

  714 shared

Labs

• Admissions TeamPI

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