Christophe Tzourio - Biography#
Christophe Tzourio, MD, PhD, has dual training in clinical neurology and epidemiology. He was initially trained as a vascular neurologist in Paris. He has been Professor of Epidemiology at the University of Bordeaux since September 2013 and was Director of the Bordeaux Population Health (BPH) Research Centre U1219 from 2013 to 2021, comprising 13 teams and more than 500 staff.
Christophe Tzourio has extensive experience in the design, management and scientific output of large population-based cohort studies. He has been involved in several projects, including the 3C study (Role: PI; 9,293 participants, 15 years follow-up), which aims to investigate the importance of vascular factors in dementia. He has also participated as a key investigator in large-scale randomised controlled trials, including the PROGRESS study and the LEOPOLD study, and is a member of a transatlantic Leducq network.
Prof Tzourio has worked mainly in the field of brain disease epidemiology and in particular the effects of hypertension on the brain, including stroke, dementia and MRI brain lesions. He is a world-renowned researcher in this field and has been invited to give many keynote lectures in plenary sessions of international conferences and to write editorials in international journals. He is co-author of > 450 original papers, which have been cited > 45,000 times (Web of Science H-index = 93).
To better understand the very early mechanisms of the effects of hypertension on the brain, he has chosen to work on young adults over the past 10 years. To this end, he established an observational cohort in university students (the i-Share study, 21,000 participants) in which a sub-sample of participants (N=1800) had a brain MRI and a biobank. This large study also provided an opportunity to study mental health of young adults and interventions to improve it. For this purpose, he gathered a multidisciplinary team of specialists in the human sciences (psychology, health communication, education, anthropology).
