Professor Dr Monique M. B. Breteler

Research Priorities: Cerebral changes, neurodegenerative diseases, dementia, Alzheimer’s disease, strategies of prevention, healthy aging
Monique Breteler is a neuroscientist. Her focus is on the changes of the brain over a course of a lifetime. Specifically, she investigates the causes of neurodegenerative diseases as well as the principles for healthy aging. Monique Breteler develops strategies to prevent age-related diseases and contributed to an understanding of Alzheimer’s disease as a complex medical condition.
Dementia illnesses emerge from an interplay of various factors and develop over decades. Well before emblematic changes like memory disorders one can observe bodily changes in the patient. Monique Breteler researches the role of metabolic defects, infections, genetic factors, and habits in the development of neurodegenerative diseases. Together with her team, she works towards the identification of the causal mechanisms of these diseases. Building on that, she wants to develop measures that could inhibit or delay age-related diseases (aetiological research). Another area is the risk prediction for vulnerable persons.
Early on, Monique Breteler advanced large-scale population studies, which employed imaging methods (magnetic resonance imaging) to examine the brain. She conducts one of the larges studies on dementia in Germany with the so-called Rheinland-Studie. The project started in 2016 and is set to last thirty years. Up to 30 000 people from the age of thirty are expected to be analysed regularly according to various factors. With that, Monique Breteler wants to identify which parts of the population are especially vulnerable to dementia. Based on its findings, the study aims to develop preventive measures against cerebral diseases like Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, or depression.