Mohammad Arfan Ikram

Adjunct Professor of Epidemiology

Department of Epidemiology

Other affiliations

Dr. Ikram is professor and head of neuro-epidemiologic research at the department of Epidemiology, Erasmus MC Rotterdam, the Netherlands. He also carries affiliations with the departments of Radiology and Neurology.

Research

He is principal investigator of neurologic diseases in the Rotterdam Study and principal investigator of the Rotterdam Scan Study. He is also a key collaborator in the CHARGE (Cohorts for Heart and Aging Research in Genomic Epidemiology) consortium. Dr. Ikram’s research focuses on investigating the etiology of neurologic diseases in the elderly, with a particular focus on dementia, Alzheimer disease, stroke, and Parkinson disease. The main areas of research are to elucidate the earliest signs of brain diseases, before clinical symptoms are present, and to understand how these lead to clinical manifestation of disease. Moreover, he is interested in preclinical signs that can be used to identify persons at highest risk of developing disease. To this aim he has used data from the large population-based Rotterdam Study and Rotterdam Scan Study that have followed nearly 15,000 persons for over 25 years. A main focus on his research has been the use of MRI-imaging to understand brain disease. Also, he has used neuropsychological testing, genome-wide, exome chip, DNA-methylation and sequencing technologies, and recently electronic gait assessments. Not only is he interested in how these pre-clinical markers lead to clinical disease, he also wants to disentangle the intricate relationships between these markers. Dr. Ikram has published over 380 international scientific papers (H-index = 47).

Teaching

Dr. Ikram’s teaching activities focus on principles of epidemiologic study design, analysis and causal inference.