Throughout August, the SDRC are publishing a series of blogs from PhD Students/ Early Career Researchers in dementia and brain health.  

For the first week, we are featuring those that were in the SDRC Impact Report 2019.  Read about Stina Saunders’ research as a PhD student from the University of Edinburgh in this excerpt below. 

I am a doctoral candidate at the University of Edinburgh Centre for Clinical Brain Sciences and a fellow at the European Prevention of Alzheimer’s Dementia (EPAD) project.

Before my PhD, I completed my postgraduate studies in Clinical Psychology at the University of Tartu in Estonia, focusing on adjustment disorders and stress reactions, and at the University of Edinburgh, researching the role of attachment in living with dementia. Aside from my doctoral work, I am involved with European Medicines Agency led work around patient preferences and patient reported outcomes measures in clinical trials.

 In my PhD, I am looking at the impact of diagnostic test disclosure in the mild cognitive impairment population. My PhD study explores how diagnostic test results are communicated to patients in Memory clinics, looking at how information given to patients about their brain health could impact the patients’ psychological reaction to their diagnosis. I have recently finished recruitment and follow-ups will be ongoing. The results will be published in 2021.

After completing my PhD, I hope to continue working in the pre-dementia stages of Alzheimer’s disease, improving the experiences of people dealing with uncertainties of disease progression.

You can follow Stina on twitter @stina_saunders 

 The SDRC will be posting blogs featuring bios from ECRs throughout August. Follow us on Twitter to keep up to date with the series.

If you are an Early Career Researcher or student that would like to write a guest blog for the SDRC, get in touch

Read the SDRC Impact Report here