PhD student Zoë Owens

Zoë's research asks:

How do we more accurately diagnose people with Lewy body dementia?  

Dementia with Lewy bodies is severely underdiagnosed, with people often getting misdiagnosed as having Alzheimer's disease.  

One of the complications in diagnosing Lewy body dementia is that  symptoms can differ from person to person, and even within a person over time.

Tell us about your project

Misdiagnosing Lewy body dementia creates a barrier to accessing appropriate care, treatment and participation in the right clinical trials. This leads to worse outcomes for people living with Lewy body dementia, who have higher mortality rates and more hospitalisations than people living with Alzheimer’s disease.  

To address the under-recognition of Lewy body dementia and improve the lives of people with it, it is helpful to identify why we are failing to recognise it clinically.  

I will link clinical data collected about people over time with what we find at autopsy for people who have Lewy bodies in their brain. Using this data, we can then describe how dementia progresses over time in people who are clinically recognised as having Lewy body dementia.  

We can then also determine whether people with undiagnosed Lewy body dementia have a worse prognosis than those who have a clinical diagnosis, and what helps or hinders recognising Lewy body dementia.

How will this research impact people living with dementia?

Gaining a better understanding of how to recognise Lewy body dementia, what causes Lewy body dementia and how it progresses over time, means we can improve care for people living with dementia.  

It can also guide screening and the development of biological markers for Lewy bodies, which would allow us to have a better idea of who might have Lewy body dementia.  

Importantly, disease-modifying treatments for Alzheimer’s disease may not work as well in people with Lewy body dementia. If people are misdiagnosed, these treatments would be less effective. It is also essential for future disease-modifying treatments for Lewy body dementia that we can recognise who has Lewy bodies.

What does it mean to you to be a part of this Doctoral Training Centre?

The Doctoral Training Centre (DTC) gives me the opportunity, as an early career researcher, to be a part of a well-connected research hub, to collaborate with peers as well as world-class experts. All of this will allow me to maximise my research impact and foster collaboration.  

There is a real focus within the DTC on student training and shaping me into a well-rounded researcher, experiencing opportunities to work with people living with dementia, their loved ones, and carers to ensure my research has the largest clinical impact and maintains relevance.