Alessandra Marengoni is currently employed as researcher at the University of Brescia, Italy. She works in the Geriatric Unit of one of the main hospitals in Northern Italy. She got a PhD in Geriatric Epidemiology in March 2008 at the Department of Neurobiology, Care Sciences and Society, Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm.

She received two fellowships during 2009, one from the Italienska Kulturhuset in Stockholm and another from the Loo and Hans Osterman Foundation. She received a further fellowship from the Loo and Hans Osterman Foundation in 2010 – these fellowships  have allowed her to continue her collaboration with researchers at the Aging Research Center.

She is a currently a guest researcher at ARC and she is  involved in the research group studying multimorbidity in the elderly. The aims are to define chronic diseases and multimorbidity, to select diseases to be included in the definition, to evaluate occurrence, causes, and consequences of multimorbidity in the old population and to investigate patterns of multimorbidity.

Her major research field is chronicity in the elderly. Specifically, she is involved in the following research lines:

• Epidemiology of chronic diseases and multimorbidity in the elderly.
• Multimorbidity, disability, and mortality in the elderly.

Main results:
Despite the increasing prevalence of chronic conditions with advancing age, knowledge concerning how diseases are distributed within the population or co-occur in the same individual is still limited. Multimorbidity is defined as the coexistance in the same person of two or more diseases. Hypertension, dementia, and heart failure are the most common chronic diseases in the elderly with a prevalence of 38, 21, and 18 per cent, respectively. Cardiovascular disease prevalence was found not to differ by age or gender, whereas a higher proportion of mental disorders was found among the old-old (85+ years) than among the younger old (77-84 years) (36.4 vs. 17.9%, p<0.001), and among women than men (29.1 vs. 17.2%, p<0.01). About one third of the population has only one disease, while 55% are affected by multimorbidity. The prevalence of multimorbidity is higher in the 85+ year-old persons (p<0.05), women, and persons with low levels of education (p<0.01) and low occupation-based SES. The number of chronic conditions incrementally increases the risk of functional decline (Hazard Ratio [HR] increases from 1.5 in subjects with one disease to 6.2 in persons with 4+ diseases). However, this is not the case for mortality, as the HR of death is the same for people with one disease as for those with 4+ diseases (HR=2.3). Baseline disability has the highest impact on survival, independently of number of diseases (HR=8.1; 95% Confidence Interval (CI) =4.8-13.7 in subjects with one disease and HR=7.7; 95% CI=4.7-12.6 in those with 2+ diseases).

• Cardiovascular diseases and the risk of Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias.

Marengoni A, Fratiglioni L, Bandinelli S, Ferrucci L. Socioeconomic Status During Lifetime and Cognitive Impairment No-Dementia in Late Life: The Population-Based Aging in the Chianti Area (InCHIANTI) Study. J Alzheimers Dis. 2011. [Epub ahead of print]

Marengoni A, Corrao S, Nobili A, Tettamanti M, Pasina L, Salerno F, Iorio A, Marcucci M, Bonometti F, Mannucci PM In-hospital death according to dementia diagnosis in acutely ill elderly patients: the REPOSI study.
Int J Geriatr Psychiatry. 2010 Epub ahead of print

Marengoni A, Bonometti F, Nobili A, Tettamanti M, Salerno F, Corrao S, Iorio A, Marcucci M, Mannucci PM;
In-hospital death and adverse clinical events in elderly patients according to disease clustering: the REPOSI study. Rejuvenation Res. 2010 Aug;13(4):469-77.

Marengoni A, Qiu C, Winblad B, Fratiglioni L. Atrial fibrillation, stroke and dementia in the very old: a population-based study. Neurobiol Aging 2009 Epub ahead of print.

Marengoni A, Rizzuto D, Wang HX, Winblad B, Fratiglioni L. Patterns of chronic multimorbidity in the elderly population. J Am Geriatr Soc. 2009 Feb;57(2):225-30.

Marengoni A, von Strauss E, Rizzuto D, Winblad B, Fratiglioni L. The impact of chronic multimorbidity and disability on functional decline and survival in elderly persons. A community-based, longitudinal study. J Intern Med. 2009 Feb;265(2):288-95.

Marengoni A, Winblad B, Karp A, Fratiglioni L. Prevalence of chronic diseases and multimorbidity among the elderly population in Sweden. Am J Public Health. 2008 Jul;98(7):1198-2000.