“We couldn’t save my grandfather, but perhaps we can save many more lives in the future and improve the quality of life for many more individuals with this research.” -Elena Biffi, O.D. The transformation happened so fast that in one year, he went from fully functioning to a nursing home and not recognizing his great grandchildren.” “Here my husband and I are, a dementia expert and an OCT expert, and we didn’t see this coming. “That was the point that hit us hard,” Dr. Not long after, severe dementia set in, and he couldn’t remember his family. Diagnosed with advanced stage CSVD, her grandfather began wandering from the house and, one night, turned up in the emergency department after struck by a car. Biffi’s grandfather, Vladimir, started experiencing gradual but noticeable memory loss. Yet, life was about to take a still more portentous turn. And it wasn’t long before her husband’s research into cerebral small vessel disease (CSVD) and vascular dementia overlapped with her own research. Biffi initiated research into the use of optical coherence tomography (OCT) for retinal diseases. After meeting her husband, Alessandro, a neurologist leading the Aging and Brain Health Research group at Massachusetts General Hospital, Dr. Biffi that opportunity to make a difference quickly turned into a purpose. “Being a doctor in the 21 st century is a career in lifelong learning, and because of it, we have an opportunity to make a lifelong difference.”īut for Dr. Biffi, now associate professor of optometry at NECO, explains. “With that I just started learning and going, and I’ve never really stopped since,” Dr. Biffi completed community college, passing biology by translating her textbook into Russian, before graduating summa cum laude from University of Massachusetts on the road to New England College of Optometry (NECO). Here, she set her mind on optometry school after overhearing medical students in her dance classes. Biffi emigrated to the United States in the late-90s with her parents and grandparents. Growing up a ballroom dancer in the shadow of a collapsed Soviet Union, Dr. Excerpted from page 20 of the November/December 2021 edition of AOA Focus.Įlena Biffi, O.D., has charted quite the circuitous if not fateful path to where she is today.
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