John Breitner

Dr. Breitner has devoted his career to the study of Alzheimer’s disease (AD), its risk factors, and their implications for its prevention. Although an expert clinician, he is better known as a researcher. His early work on familial aggregation in AD evolved to twin studies of heritability and environmental risk factors. He then founded the Cache County Study of Memory in Aging, a longitudinal investigation of genetic and environmental antecedents of AD, which has produced over 100 scientific papers. More recently he was Chair of the randomized placebo-controlled Alzheimer’s Disease Anti-inflammatory Prevention Trial (ADAPT) that evaluated two nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs for primary prevention of AD in healthy elderly. As that trial winds down, he recently joined the McGill faculty to establish the new StoP-AD Centre at the Douglas. This Centre is devoted to identification and quantitation of AD markers in the pre-symptomatic stage of the disease, and to preliminary testing of experimental strategies for that may prevent progression of pre-symptomatic disease to dementia. Dr. Breitner is has mentored more than 15 individuals who have gone on to tenure-track academic positions, nine of these whom have independent NIH funding, 3 are now Chairs and one the Executive Editor of a leading Alzheimer’s disease journal.