Speaker – Kristina Elvidge PhD – Childhood dementia Initiative.

Join us as we hear about Childhood dementia which effects one in 2900 babies globally. Childhood dementia is an umbrella group of rare, mostly untreatable neurodegenerative disorders that show symptoms before the age of 18. These conditions cause progressive deterioration of the brain and the loss of previously acquired skills such as talking, walking, and playing. Our speaker will be Kristina Elvidge PhD, Head of Research, from the Childhood Dementia Initiative.

Kris Elvidge has been wrking with rare disease patient organisations since 2008, to accelerate the development of much needed treatments. She is currently Head of Research at the Childhood Dementia Initiative, an organisation founded in 2020 to drive systemic change and transform outcomes for children with dementia. She was lead author on a study published in the medical journal Brain in 2023 which is raising awareness of the scale of childhood dementia with researchers, clinicians, governments and policy makers globally. She was previously Head of Research at Sanfilippo Children’s Foundation which funds research into Sanfilippo syndrome, one of the more than 100 rare diseases that cause childhood dementia,and has also worked with several muscular dystrophy patient organisations both in Australia and the UK. Kris completed a PhD in molecular biology at University of Western Australia and a postdoc at the University of Oxford.

We look forward to hearing from Kris.