14 Sep 20. RSM virtual meeting

Congratulations to Dr Una Clancy, CSO Clinical Research Fellow, on receiving both the judges prize & the audience vote prize for her talk at the Royal Society of Medicine Geriatrics & Gerontology Section virtual meeting.

Dr Una Clancy is a CSO Clinical Research Fellow in Cerebral Small Vessel Diseases with Professor Joanna Wardlaw’s SVD Research Group.

Una presented at the Royal Society of Medicine Geriatrics & Gerontology Section: Clinical governance, audit & research prize 2020, which is awarded to trainees in geriatric medicine & old age psychiatry.

She presented work from the ongoing Mild Stroke Study 3, a project funded by UK Dementia Research Institute, Fondation-Leducq, Chief Scientist Office & Stroke Association.

This is a longitudinal clinical study of cerebral small vessel diseases assessing factors that affect brain small vessel dysfunction, how this damages the brain, whether the effects are permanent or can resolve, whether some individuals are more vulnerable than others to the effects of small vessel dysfunction, & associated factors including clinical & cognitive risk markers [study protocol available here].

For her CSO-funded fellowship, Una is interested in detecting clinical factors associated with the presence & progression of SVD, including neuropsychiatric symptoms.

She presented the findings that informant-reported cognitive & functional decline are associated with silent acute stroke lesions & worse small vessel disease in patients with mild stroke.

We asked Una how she felt regarding both awards.

The prize acknowledges the importance of identifying atypical clinical features associated with small vessel disease, beyond stroke & dementia, the dedication of participants & their families involved in the study, & the work of the many members of Prof Wardlaw’s Small Vessel Diseases research group who are involved in the Mild Stroke Study 3.