Lawrence Whalley

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Lawrence J. Whalley, MD DPM FRCP(E) FRCPsych is Crombie Ross Professor of Mental Health in the University of Aberdeen, Scotland, UK.

He is best known for his ground-breaking follow-up studies of about 750 Aberdeen City and Shire residents who took part at age 11 years in the Scottish Mental Surveys of 1932 and 1947.

Whalley's popular science account of the aging brain (Phoenix Press, 2004) was well reviewed and describes some of his research findings on brain structural and functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging, nutrition, genetics and physical health and how these explain differences in individual rates of ageing of some mental abilities while others are relatively preserved.

Lawrence Whalley trained in epidemiology , psychometrics and psychoneuroendocrinology before beginning cytogenetic-environment studies in early onset Alzheimer’s Disease (EOAD). In the University of Edinburgh with MRC support, he studied the epidemiology of EOAD in Scotland (1974-1988), found non-random urban “clusters” of EOAD and identified childhood environmental factors which increased risk and reduced survival after dementia onset. Using kinship analysis he showed ancestral genes could partly explain some “clusters” but were of small effect at a population level.

Together with Ian Deary and John Starr, he began prospective studies of cognitive decline and vascular risk factors in 1300 healthy old people in Edinburgh. In 1997, he re-discovered a unique national archive of childhood IQ data (N~160,000) that could be used to estimate life long cognitive variation. No other country has ever IQ tested a total population sample in this way. In 1998, he devised a strategy to recruit 250 Aberdeen survivors all born in 1921 of the Scottish Mental Survey of 1932 (subjects by then aged 77) and next, in 2000, he recruited 500 survivors all born in 1936 from a second 1947 Survey (subjects by then aged 64 years).

With support of a Wellcome Senior Fellowship (2001-2006), he consolidated and extended his database and followed up these cohorts biennially for 5 years. He showed that dementia incidence is greater in those of lower childhood IQ, that lifetime variation in cognitive performance is linked to specific genetic factors, smoking, nutritional factors, childhood intelligence and education.

His research group has developed advanced statistical models of longitudinal changes in cognitive performance that now include findings from longitudinal brain MRI studies and measures of information processing efficiency. With Deary and Starr, parallel follow-up studies were begun in Edinburgh University.