Agustin IbanezUniversidad Adolfo Ibáñez · Latin American Brain Health Institute (BrainLat)
Agustin Ibanez
PhD
Researcher
About
700
Publications
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Introduction
Agustin Ibanez is an Argentinean neuroscientist interested in global approaches to dementia and social, cognitive, and affective neuroscience. He is a full professor and Director of the Latin American Brain Health Institute (BrainLat) at Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez (UAI, Chile), an Associate Research Professor at GBHI-Trinity College Dublin, and Team Leader of Predictive Brain Health Modelling Group, Trinity College Dublin. Also, he is a Senior Atlantic Fellow at GBHI-UCSF.
Publications
Publications (700)
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Central to moral cognition is the detection of intentional harm. Using direct electrophysiological recordings in human subjects, Hesse et al. show that scenes of intentional harm induce early activation of the amygdala. This activation predicts intention attribution and engages a frontotemporal network, supporting the ‘man...
As shown by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, terrorism is one of the most pernicious threats to contemporary societies. In addition to obliterating the freedom and physical integrity of victims, terrorist practices can destabilize governments, undermine civil harmony and threaten economic development1. This is tr...
From the robust to the nonreplicable, from the trivial to the groundbreaking, virtually
all findings in cognitive neuroscience stem from the same approach: divide and conquer.
Indeed, the field’s ethos has long been to decompose mental phenomena into a
series of separate mechanisms which can be individually operationalized. Imagine
we want to explo...
Latin American populations may present patterns of sociodemographic, ethnic and cultural diversity that can defy current universal models of healthy aging. The potential combination of risk factors that influence aging across populations in Latin American and Caribbean (LAC) countries is unknown. Compared to other regions where classical factors su...
The mind has been traditionally conceived as a set of differentiated, compartmentalized cognitive elements. However, understanding everyday, naturalistic cognition across brain health and disease entails major challenges. How can mainstream approaches be extended to cognition in the wild? Pragmatic, methodological, disease-related, and theoretical...
Dementia prevention in Africa is critically underexplored, despite the continent's high prevalence of modifiable risk factors. With a predominantly young and middle‐aged population, Africa presents a prime opportunity to implement evidence‐based strategies that could significantly reduce future dementia cases and mitigate its economic impact. The m...
Importance
Since 2018, a movement has emerged to define Alzheimer disease (AD) as a purely biological entity based on biomarker findings. The recent revision of the Alzheimer Association (AA) criteria for AD furthers this direction. However, concerns about a purely biological definition of AD being applied clinically, the understanding of AD by soc...
Background: Latin Americas diverse genetic makeup, shaped by centuries of admixture, presents a unique opportunity to study Alzheimer's disease dementia (AD) and frontotemporal dementia (FTD). Our aim is to identify genetic variations associated with AD and FTD within this population.
Methods: The Multi-Partner Consortium to Expand Dementia Researc...
Optimal brain health is essential to smoothing major global skill-intensive economic transitions, such as the bioeconomy, green, care economy and digital transitions. Good brain health is vital to socio-economic sustainability, productivity and well-being. The care transition focuses on recognizing and investing in care services and care work as es...
Objectives
To investigate associations of the ‘weekend warrior’ physical activity pattern with mild dementia.
Methods
Participants in the Mexico City Prospective Study were surveyed from 1998 to 2004 and re-surveyed from 2015 to 2019. Participants were asked about leisure time physical activity at baseline. Those who exercised up to once or twice...
Growing evidence suggests that abnormal diurnal blood pressure rhythms may be associated with many adverse health outcomes including increased risk of cognitive impairment and dementia. This study evaluates methodological aspects of research on bidirectional associations between ambulatory blood pressure monitoring (ABPM) patterns and cognitive fun...
Cross-sectional studies suggest a limited relationship between accelerated epigenetic aging derived from epigenetic clocks, and Alzheimer’s disease (AD) pathophysiology or risk. However, most prior analyses have not utilized longitudinal analyses or whole-brain neuroimaging biomarkers of AD. Herein, we employed longitudinal modeling and structural...
INTRODUCTION
Early detection of both objective and subjective cognitive impairment is important. Subjective complaints in healthy individuals can precede objective deficits. However, the differential associations of objective and subjective cognition with modifiable dementia risk factors are unclear.
METHODS
We gathered a large cross‐sectional sam...
Background
Structural income inequality – the uneven income distribution across regions or countries – could affect brain structure and function, beyond individual differences. However, the impact of structural income inequality on the brain dynamics and the roles of demographics and cognition in these associations remains unexplored.
Methods
Here...
Background: Harmonising assessment for neurocognitive disorders (NCDs) is an urgent priority for both clinical settings and research. In 2022, we launched the SIGNATURE initiative with the aim to harmonize and optimise the use of socio-cognitive assessments in NCDs. Hereby, we report findings from the first phase of the initiative including the eva...
Many coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID‐19) positive individuals exhibit abnormal electroencephalographic (EEG) activity reflecting “brain fog” and mild cognitive impairments even months after the acute phase of infection. Resting‐state EEG abnormalities include EEG slowing (reduced alpha rhythm; increased slow waves) and epileptiform activity. An exp...
Brain clocks, which quantify discrepancies between brain age and chronological age, hold promise for understanding brain health and disease. However, the impact of diversity (including geographical, socioeconomic, sociodemographic, sex and neurodegeneration) on the brain-age gap is unknown. We analyzed datasets from 5,306 participants across 15 cou...
BACKGROUND
Education influences brain health and dementia. However, its impact across regions, specifically Latin America (LA) and the United States (US), is unknown.
METHODS
A total of 1412 participants comprising controls, patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD), and frontotemporal lobar degeneration (FTLD) from LA and the US were included. We st...
Measuring transient functional connectivity is an important challenge in Electroencephalogram (EEG) research. Here, the rich potential for insightful, discriminative information of brain activity offered by high temporal resolution is confounded by the inherent noise of the medium and the spurious nature of correlations computed over short temporal...
Ketamine is a dissociative anesthetic that induces a shift in global consciousness states and related brain dynamics. Portable low-density EEG systems could be used to monitor these effects. However, previous evidence is almost null and lacks adequate methods to address global dynamics with a small number of electrodes. This study delves into brain...
Current dementia research has developed complex models of environmental–genetic interactions to better address multimodal
disease phenotypes. New evidence highlights a stronger effect of social determinants of health than ancestry effects specific to Latin America and the Caribbean, which opens new agendas to address the diversity of these interact...
Introduction
The COVID-19 pandemic, with over 83 million confirmed cases and 1.8 million deaths, has raised concerns about long-term cognitive issues, especially in populations facing disparities. Despite a few years since Peru’s first COVID-19 wave, the cognitive effects on adults remain unclear. This study is the first in Peru to explore COVID-19...
Models of healthy aging are typically based on the United States and Europe and may not apply to diverse and heterogeneous populations. In this study, our objectives were to conduct a meta-analysis to assess risk factors of cognition and functional ability across aging populations in Latin America and a scoping review focusing on methodological pro...
Dementia can disrupt how people experience and describe events as well as their own role in them. Alzheimer’s disease (AD) compromises the processing of entities expressed by nouns, while behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD) entails a depersonalized perspective with increased third-person references. Yet, no study has examined whether...
Aging affects brain structure and function alongside metabolic and vascular processes leading to energetic impairments. While local neurometabolic dysfunction in aging is well-documented, the influence of systemic cardiometabolic and vascular markers on brain structure and function remains less understood. We examine the link between cardiometaboli...
INTRODUCTION
While Latin America (LatAm) is facing an increasing burden of dementia due to the rapid aging of the population, it remains underrepresented in dementia research, diagnostics, and care.
METHODS
In 2023, the Alzheimer's Association hosted its eighth satellite symposium in Mexico, highlighting emerging dementia research, priorities, and...
Background: Brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) is crucial for brain health, and exercise has been shown to boost its levels. However, the impact of exercise on BDNF on apparently healthy participants, studied exclusively through randomized controlled trials (RCTs), remains unclear. We conducted a systematic-review and multilevel meta-analyses...
Background
The relationship between 24-hour rest-activity rhythms (RARs) and risk for dementia or mild cognitive impairment (MCI) remains an area of growing interest. Previous studies were often limited by small sample sizes, short follow-ups, and older participants. More studies are required to fully explore the link between disrupted RARs and dem...
Two of every three persons living with dementia reside in low‐ and middle‐income countries (LMICs). The projected increase in global dementia rates is expected to affect LMICs disproportionately. However, the majority of global dementia care costs occur in high‐income countries (HICs), with dementia research predominantly focusing on HICs. This imb...
The lifespan is influenced by adverse childhood experiences that create predispositions to poor health outcomes. Here we propose an allostatic framework of childhood experiences and their impact on health across the lifespan, focusing on Latin American and Caribbean countries. This region is marked by significant social and health inequalities nest...
Growing up in neglectful households can impact multiple aspects of social cognition. However, research on neglect's effects on social cognition processes and their neuroanatomical correlates during adolescence is scarce. Here, we aimed to comprehensively assess social cognition processes (recognition of basic and contextual emotions, theory of mind...
Recent integrative multilevel models offer novel insights into the etiology and course of neurodegenerative conditions. The predictive coding of allostatic-interoception theory posits that the brain adapts to environmental demands by modulating internal bodily signals through the allostatic-interoceptive system. Specifically, a domain-general allos...
Introduction
Social adaptation is a multifaceted process that encompasses cognitive, social, and affective factors. Previous research often focused on isolated variables, overlooking their interactions, especially in challenging environments. Our study addresses this by investigating how cognitive (working memory, verbal intelligence, self-regulati...
Background
The hypothesis of decreased neural inhibition in dementia has been sparsely studied in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data across patients with different dementia subtypes, and the role of social and demographic heterogeneities on this hypothesis remains to be addressed.
Methods
We inferred regional inhibition by fitting a...
Frontotemporal dementia (FTD) encompasses a spectrum of disorders characterized by distinct behavioral, cognitive, and motor symptoms. Deficits in interoception and allostasis have garnered attention, considering the involvement of the allostatic-interoceptive network in FTD, their contribution to canonical social cognitive and affective deficits,...
Brain clocks, which quantify discrepancies between brain age and chronological age, hold promise for understanding brain health and disease. However, the impact of multimodal diversity (geographical, socioeconomic, sociodemographic, sex, neurodegeneration) on the brain age gap (BAG) is unknown. Here, we analyzed datasets from 5,306 participants acr...
INTRODUCTION
Alzheimer's disease (AD) and behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD) lack mechanistic biophysical modeling in diverse, underrepresented populations. Electroencephalography (EEG) is a high temporal resolution, cost‐effective technique for studying dementia globally, but lacks mechanistic models and produces non‐replicable res...
Measuring transient functional connectivity is an important challenge in Electroencephalogram (EEG) research. Here, the rich potential for insightful, discriminative information of brain activity offered by high temporal resolution is confounded by the inherent noise of the medium and the spurious nature of correlations computed over short temporal...
Methods
In a double-blinded cross-over design, 30 adults (mean age = 25.57, SD = 3.74; all male) were administered racemic ketamine and compared against saline infusion as a control. Both task-driven (auditory oddball paradigm) and resting-state EEG were recorded. HOI were computed using advanced multivariate information theory tools, allowing us t...
Objectives
The objective was to investigate the benefits of the ‘weekend warrior’ physical activity pattern in Latin America, where many people take part in high levels of non-exercise physical activity.
Methods
Participants in the Mexico City Prospective Study were surveyed from 1998 to 2004 and resurveyed from 2015 to 2019. Those who exercised u...
Coping with dementia requires an integrated approach encompassing personal, health, research, and community domains. Here we describe “Walking the Talk for Dementia,” an immersive initiative aimed at empowering people with dementia, enhancing dementia understanding, and inspiring collaborations. This initiative involved 300 participants from 25 nat...
Despite significant improvements in our understanding of brain diseases, many barriers remain. Cognitive neuroscience faces four major challenges: complex structure–function associations; disease phenotype heterogeneity; the lack of transdiagnostic models; and oversimplified cognitive approaches restricted to the laboratory. Here, we propose a syne...
The coming years are likely to be turbulent due to a myriad of factors or polycrisis, including an escalation in climate extremes, emerging public health threats, weak productivity, increases in global economic instability and further weakening in the integrity of global democracy. These formidable challenges are not exogenous to the economy but ar...
Cognitive studies on Parkinson’s disease (PD) reveal abnormal semantic processing. Most research, however, fails to indicate which conceptual properties are most affected and capture patients’ neurocognitive profiles. Here, we asked persons with PD, healthy controls, and individuals with behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD, as a disea...
Aging diminishes social cognition, and changes in this capacity can indicate brain diseases. However, the relative contribution of age, diagnosis and brain reserve to social cognition, especially among older adults and in global settings, remains unclear when considering other factors. Here, using a computational approach, we combined predictors of...
Background
Though central to dementia assessments, verbal fluency tasks are suboptimally exploited. Performance is typically measured by counting valid responses. This precludes insights on which word types are least accessible to patients, while failing to discriminate among disorders. Alternatively, each word can be decomposed into relevant prope...
Background
White matter hyperintensities (WMH) are frequently observed on MRI scans of older people. Usually interpreted as a sign of cerebrovascular disease (CVD), they are also associated with an increased risk of cognitive impairment and dementia. WMH are prevalent in Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and in behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia (bv...
Background
Abnormal gamma oscillations (γ) have been systematically reported in preclinical animal models of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and human AD patients. However, little is known about the underlying mechanisms, non‐linear dynamics, and high‐order interactions of γ in dementia.
Method
To bridge this gap, we combined EEG and fMRI with three nove...
Background
White matter hyperintensities (WMHs) are frequently seen on FLAIR MRI images in aging and Dementia. It has been hypothesized that an imbalance in norepinephrine (NE) signaling could lead to a “hypometabolism” by decreasing astrocyte metabolism which has been proposed as an important cause leading to local demyelination.We hypothesize tha...
Background
Social cognition dysfunction in neurodegenerative diseases such as the behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD) and Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) is typically ascribed to the underlying pathophysiological processes spanning specific atrophy and connectivity alterations. However, social cognition performance might be modulated by a s...
Background
White matter hyperintensities (WMH) are Flair signal abnormalities frequently seen in periventricular and subcortical brain regions in the elderly. They are presumed to be, at least in part, a sign of cardiovascular disease (CVD). WMHs are associated with stroke, cognitive decline, and dementia. Given that most of the literature on demen...
Background
Cross‐sectional studies suggest a limited but promising relationship between epigenetic clocks, estimated using DNA methylation patterns, and Alzheimer’s disease (AD) pathophysiology and risk. However, prior analyses did not utilize longitudinal analyses or neuroimaging biomarkers of AD. Herein, we employed survival and structural neuroi...
Background
Alzheimer’s disease (AD) causes disruption in the collective dynamics of the brain activities which can be captured by analyzing the functional interactions between electroencephalographic (EEG) signals in different regions of the brain. To better assess the AD‐related changes in the interactions, one possible approach is to increase the...
Background
Currently, dementia training is only offered in a few large medical centers in a handful of Latin America ́s biggest cities. Reduced access and the heterogeneous quality of dementia education for clinicians hinder the diagnosis and treatment of neurodegeneration in Latin America.
Aim
This project aims to fill the education gaps and incr...
Background
The prevalence of dementia is notably high among Latinos, the largest and fastest‐growing minority community in the United States (US). Relatedly, brain health problems and dementia prevalence in Latin American countries (LACs) are overgrowing, along with the consequent clinical, social, and economic burden upon patients and their famili...
Background
Neuroimaging biomarkers are intensively investigated in Alzheimer disease (AD) and the behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD). However, advanced ND biomarkers (i.e., PET and plasma) are expensive or not widely available/validated in underrepresented regions. EEG emerges as a promising alternative, due to its low‐cost, non‐inv...
Background
Timely diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is a critical first step in clinical care treatment. However, the availability of diagnostic tools for these conditions is either unavailable or unaffordable, especially in Latin American and the Caribbean (LAC) countries. In this scenario, microRNAs (miRNA) have recently emerged as promising...
Background
Global initiatives call for further understanding of the impact of inequity on aging across underserved populations. Previous research in LMICs presents limitations in assessing combined sources of inequity and outcomes (i.e., cognition and functionality). In this study, we assessed how social determinants of health (SDH), cardiometaboli...
BACKGROUND
The relationship between 24-h rest-activity rhythms (RAR) and risk for dementia or mild cognitive impairment (MCI) remains an area of growing interest. Previous studies, often limited by small sample sizes, short follow-ups, and older participants, has yet to fully explore the link between disrupted RAR and dementia/MCI in middle-aged an...