Education
Breteler received her medical degree from the University of Nijmegen (1987) and her Doctor of Philosophy degree in epidemiology from the Erasmus University Rotterdam (1993).
Breteler received her medical degree from the University of Nijmegen (1987) and her Doctor of Philosophy degree in epidemiology from the Erasmus University Rotterdam (1993).
She is Director of Population Health Sciences at the German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases (DZNE), Professor of Population Health Sciences at the University of Bonn, and Adjunct Professor of Epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston, Massachusetts. She joined the Department of Epidemiology at Erasmus University Rotterdam in 1989 to develop the neurologic component in the Rotterdam Study, a large cohort study on chronic diseases in the elderly. From 1995 to 2011 she was head of the neuroepidemiology section of the department, where she was the primary investigator for neurological diseases of the Rotterdam Study and initiated the Rotterdam Scan Study.
Since 2011 she is Director of Population Health Sciences at the German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases (DZNE) and Professor of Population Health Sciences at the University of Bonn.
She also holds an appointment in the Department of Epidemiology of the Harvard School of Public Health, Boston, Master of Arts, since 2002, where she is adjunct professor of epidemiology. Breteler"s research interest is in the etiology and preclinical detection of age-related neurodegenerative and cerebrovascular disorders, including dementia (in particular Alzheimer"s disease), Parkinson"s disease and stroke.
Foreign more than 20 years, Breteler worked on the Rotterdam Study, a prospective population-based study of frequency and causes of age-related disorders that includes 15,000 persons and has been ongoing since 1990, she also initiated the Rotterdam Scan Study, a prospective population-based neuroimaging study that includes more than 5000 people. With her research in the Rotterdam study, Breteler identified a link between life-style factors, vascular and brain diseases.
At the German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases, Breteler is establishing the Rhineland Study, a prospective cohort study of 30,000 individuals that aims to identify causes and preclinical multimodal biomarker profiles of neurodegenerative and neuropsychiatric diseases and to investigate normal and pathological brain structure and function over the adult life course.
Honours and