Uncovering burden of dementia in Lebanon: What next?
October 13, 2017
Monique Chaaya, DrPH
Professor of Epidemiology, Department of Epidemiology & Population Health
Faculty of Health Sciences, American University of Beirut
Beirut, Lebanon
Profile
Monique Chaaya’s research interests focus on mental health and tobacco control. She has conducted cross-sectional and longitudinal studies on the mental health of vulnerable populations including pregnant women, prisoners of war, and displaced and older adults in underprivileged communities.
She has also validated in Arabic five mental health scales such as the Arabic Geriatric Depression Scale (GDS), the Arabic Perceived Stress Scale, and A-RUDAS (Rowland Universal Dementia Assessment Scale). Her interest in mental health of older adults began in 2000 when she joined a multidisciplinary Urban Health Research Group and served as a co-investigator on a comprehensive survey examining the health of disadvantaged older persons.
In 2011 she received an NIH R21 grant to study the prevalence of dementia in Lebanon, in collaboration with international researchers from Denmark and the UK. Building on the NIH grant, she developed a cohort study on dementia (COLDS) funded by the Lebanese National Council for Scientific Research. The focus of this study is to determine the incidence of dementia and other health outcome including mortality, hospitalization and institutionalization.
Monique is a Professor of Epidemiology in the Faculty of Health Sciences, American University of Beirut, Lebanon. She received her DrPH from the Department of Mental Health at John Hopkins School of Public Health. She served for 6 years as the chair of the Epidemiology and Population Health Department and played a major role in developing the proposal for a PhD in Epidemiology program, and revising the MPH and MS programs in Epidemiology and Population Health. For the last 6 years, she has been involved in coordinating a training program at King Abdullah International Medical Research Center (KAIMRC) and other academic units at the King Saud Abdul-Aziz University for Health Sciences (KSAU-HS) to build research capacity of junior medical’/clinical researchers at KAIMRC.