Anya Topiwala
MA BMBCh MRCPsych DPhil
Wellcome Trust CRCD Fellow; Consultant Psychiatrist
I qualified in Medicine from the University of Oxford and subsequently pursued specialist training in older adult psychiatry. In 2017 I completed a DPhil in Psychiatry based on the MRC-funded study "Predicting MRI abnormalities with longitudinal data of the Whitehall II Substudy".
My current research, based in the Neuroimaging Statistics group at the Big Data Institute, uses population neuroimaging to study the impact of risk and resilience factors on psychiatric and cognitive disorders of later life. A particular interest is the association of alcohol consumption, a lifestyle factor which is widespread and modifiable, with adverse brain outcomes including dementia. As a practicing clinician I hope my research will ultimately yield benefits in dementia prevention.
In 2019 I was awarded a Wellcome Trust Clinical Research Career Development Fellowship to investigate the effect of and mechanistic pathways through which alcohol consumption impacts brain health. Using huge databases, which contain lifestyle and clinical data on millions of people in the UK and US, and the largest brain imaging and genetic samples worldwide, I will clarify how alcohol affects brain structure and function. The research will be conducted in collaboration with colleagues at the Universities of Oxford, Yale and London.
My previous funding has been through the MRC, the Ruth and Nevill Mott Scholarship at Linacre College, and grants from Alzheimer's Research UK and the University of Oxford. Prizes awarded include the Gosling Fellowship from the Royal College of Psychiatrists, a Junior Investigator Award from the European Society for Biomedical Research on Alcoholism, and a European Psychiatry Society Research prize.
Key publications
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Journal article
Topiwala A. et al, (2017), BMJ, 357
Recent publications
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Association between cannabis use and brain imaging phenotypes in UK Biobank: an observational and Mendelian randomization study
Preprint
Ishrat S. et al, (2023)
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Lifestyle-related risk factors and their cumulative associations with hippocampal and total grey matter volume across the adult lifespan: A pooled analysis in the European Lifebrain consortium.
Journal article
Binnewies J. et al, (2023), Brain Res Bull, 200
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Development and validation of a dementia risk score in the UK Biobank and Whitehall II cohorts.
Journal article
Anatürk M. et al, (2023), BMJ Ment Health, 26
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Association of gout with brain reserve and vulnerability to neurodegenerative disease.
Journal article
Topiwala A. et al, (2023), Nat Commun, 14
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Telomere length and brain imaging phenotypes in UK Biobank
Journal article
NICHOLS T. et al, (2023), PLoS One