Christine E. Kistler MD MASC

Associate Professor of Medicine, Division of Geriatric Medicine, School of Medicine, University of Pittsburgh

Dr. Christine Kistler is a Family Medicine physician with additional certification in Geriatrics and Hospice and Palliative Medicine. She is a health services researcher with a focus on improving the appropriateness of complex medical decision-making, especially for older adults. She is currently the PI of a randomized control trial, “Improving Primary Care Clinicians' Advance Care Planning for Alzheimer's Disease and Related Dementias.” She has additional expertise assessing the quality-of-care older adults receive though her training with the Veterans’ Affairs Quality Scholars program. She served as one of the 6 Hub PIs for the “PREVENTABLE (PRagmatic EValuation of evENTs And Benefits of Lipid-lowering in oldEr Adults)” trial, the largest pragmatic trial in US older adults to date using 20,000 participants to examine the links between statins and ADRD, organizing 11 sites, and was the site PI for University of North Carolina (UNC) which consistently ranked in the top 10 recruitment sites. She has been a site-PI and co-investigator on several other NIH funded studies bringing her expertise in geriatrics and medical decision-making, particularly in long-term care, infection control, and advance care planning for people with dementia. New areas of her research are in telehealth use in long-term care and pharmacogenetics in long-term care.

Publications:

Kistler CE, Zimmerman S, Khairat S. Health Information Technology Challenges and Innovations in Long-Term Care. J Am Med Dir Assoc. 2021 May;22(5):981-983. doi: 10.1016/j.jamda.2021.03.017. Epub 2021 Apr 23. PMID: 33896713.

Joseph J, Pajewski NM, Dolor RJ, Sellers MA, Perdue LH, Peeples SR, Henrie AM, Woolard N, Jones WS, Benziger CP, Orkaby AR, Mixon AS, VanWormer JJ, Shapiro MD, Kistler CE, Polonsky TS, Chatterjee R, Chamberlain AM, Forman DE, Knowlton KU, Gill TM, Newby LK, Hammill BG, Cicek MS, Williams NA, Decker JE, Ou J, Rubinstein J, Choudhary G, Gazmuri RJ, Schmader KE, Roumie CL, Vaughan CP, Effron MB, Cooper-DeHoff RM, Supiano MA, Shah RC, Whittle JC, Hernandez AF, Ambrosius WT, Williamson JD, Alexander KP; PREVENTABLE Trial Research Group. Pragmatic evaluation of events and benefits of lipid lowering in older adults (PREVENTABLE): Trial design and rationale. J Am Geriatr Soc. 2023 Jun;71(6):1701-1713. doi: 10.1111/jgs.18312. Epub 2023 Apr 20. PMID: 37082807; PMCID: PMC10258159.

Lynch DH, Lynch ME, Wessell KL, Kistler CE, Hanson LC. Performance of an embedded algorithm to identify people with dementia in a clinical trial. J Am Geriatr Soc. 2023 Nov;71(11):3647-3651. doi: 10.1111/jgs.18558. Epub 2023 Aug 18. PMID: 37593793; PMCID: PMC10841216.

Kistler CE, Inoue M, Matsui T, Abe M, Le Donne M, Kiyota A, Lin FC, Yang Y, Hanson LC. Pre-post-evaluation of a dementia-specific advance care planning toolkit for Japanese primary care clinicians. J Am Geriatr Soc. 2024 Oct;72(10):3171-3178. doi: 10.1111/jgs.19040. Epub 2024 Jun 19. PubMed PMID: 38895937; PubMed Central PMCID: PMC11461113 

Toles M, Kistler C, Lin FC, Lynch M, Wessell K, Mitchell SL, Hanson LC. Palliative care for persons with late-stage Alzheimer's and related dementias and their caregivers: protocol for a randomized clinical trial. Trials. 2023 Sep 25;24(1):606. doi: 10.1186/s13063-023-07614-4. Erratum in: Trials. 2024 Jun 21;25(1):407. doi: 10.1186/s13063-024-08260-0. PMID: 37743478; PMCID: PMC10518941.