Sharon K. Inouye, M.D., M.P.H.
Director, Aging Brain Center
Professor of Medicine, HMS, BIDMC

Aging Brain Center
Institute for Aging Research
1200 Centre Street
Boston, MA 02131

Tel: 617-971-5390
Fax: 617-971-5309

agingbraincenter@hrca.harvard.edu

Dr. Sharon K. Inouye holds the Milton and Shirley F. Levy Family Chair at Hebrew SeniorLife's Institute for Aging Research and is a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School (Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center).

Dr. Inouye was previously at Yale University School of Medicine from 1985 to 2005, where she was a professor of medicine, director of the Yale Mentored Clinical Research Scholars Program (K12), co-director of the Yale Program on Aging and Claude D. Pepper Older Americans Independence Center, director of the Yale Mentorship Program in Patient-Oriented Research on Aging, and director of Patient-Oriented Research for the Yale Investigative Medicine Program (K30).

Dr. Inouye's focus has been to translate the theories of clinical investigation to practical applications that can be used to improve the quality of life for older adults. Her primary research has focused on delirium and functional decline in hospitalized older patients, resulting in more than 140 peer-reviewed original articles to date. She developed and validated an instrument for the identification of delirium called the Confusion Assessment Method (CAM), which is now the most widely used standard in the field. She conceptualized the multifactorial model for delirium, which focuses on identification of predisposing and precipitating factors for delirium. Finally, she developed a multicomponent intervention strategy to prevent delirium, targeted toward six delirium risk factors. This strategy, called the Hospital Elder Life Program (HELP), was demonstrated to be successful in reducing delirium by 40 percent and was published in a landmark study in the New England Journal of Medicine. This study was the first to show that a substantial proportion of delirium is preventable. The HELP program has been shown to be cost-effective and is now undergoing national dissemination. See http://www.hospitalelderlifeprogram.org/.

Dr. Inouye has been awarded many of the highest accolades in her field, including the American Geriatrics Society Outstanding Scientific Achievement for Clinical Investigation Award (1998), Donaghue Investigator Award (1998-2003), Midcareer Award from the National Institute on Aging (1999-2005), and to the American Society of Clinical Investigation (2002), the Ewald W. Busse Research Award in Biomedical Sciences (Gerontological Society of America, 2003), the UCLA David H. Solomon Award (2005), the 2005 Leonard Tow Humanism in Medicine Award (Arnold P. Gold Foundation), election to the Yale Society of Distinguished Teachers (2005), election to the Association of American Physicians (AAP) (2007), and she won the 2010 Edward Henderson Award for the American Geriatrics Society.  Her work has been continuously funded by the National Institutes of Health since 1991.  

Dr. Inouye now plans to examine the interface of delirium and dementia with multiple studies to investigate whether delirium alters the course of dementia and whether delirium itself leads to longstanding cognitive impairment and pathologic changes in the brain.