Clinical Trials

The purpose of this study is to optimize profile questionnaire and matching algorithm developed in Phase I and implement in final website design, and to determine if algorithmically matched participants have statistically significant increase in match satisfaction and self-reported sense of resiliency and quality of life over randomly matched caregivers.

The purpose of this study is to learn more about amyloid and tau burden in the brain of patients with Atypical Alzheimer's Disease and how that burden may change over a two-year period.

The purpose of this study is to collect blood samples for DNA analysis from patients clinically diagnosed with Alzheimers disease, Lewy Body disease, and Frontotemporal degeneration.

There is evidence that neurodegenerative changes precede clinical symptoms in Alzheimer’s disease by two decades (Villemagne et al, 2013). Early detection is critical for development of interventions to halt, slow, or even reverse these pathological processes. The promise of plasma biomarkers to identify early pathology is growing rapidly (Palmqvist et al, 2020), however it is likely that multiple converging biomarkers will be necessary to identify the earliest pathological changes, as subtle differences from healthy controls may fall within the margin of error for any given single biomarker measure. Here we propose that the evaluation of speech and language for both baseline (cross-sectional) and longitudinal changes (within-participant) may add significant value to early pre-clinical pathological changes in MCI and AD. This is bolstered by emerging evidence of the relationship between language characteristics and amyloid burden (Verfaillie et al, 2019) and the large literature that characterizes language-use differences and deficits across the spectrum of cognitive decline (e.g., Mueller et al, 2018). We propose to add a series of in-clinic language elicitation tasks that allow for automated assessment of relevant speech and language domains and to validate these measures cross-sectionally and longitudinally relevant to neuropsychological, blood, and PET biomarkers.

The purpose of this study is to develop and test the effectiveness of an investigational imaging technique called magnetic resonance elastography (MRE) to measure the stiffness (mechanical properties) of tissues.

The goal of this study is to gain a better understanding of the status of advanced care planning among caregivers of patients with dementia and examine how this differs by race and disease stage.

The overall purpose of this research is to understand how ADAD develops in order to eventually provide treatments for this disorder. Each biological child of a person with an ADAD mutation has a 50% risk of inheriting the mutation, and thus of developing ADAD. This study will develop a registry of families with a known ADAD mutation and will collect, analyze and bank data, tissue, and brain images from the members who participate in the DIAN research study. The data and tissue collected are available to all qualified researchers who wish to determine what changes occur before and after ADAD symptoms start. This understanding may lead to better tests and treatments for ADAD.

This study aims to establish, use, and extensively share a comprehensive longitudinal resource of genetic, non-genetic, and cognitive data, brain imaging and fluid biomarker measurements of amyloid-β (Aβ), tau pathophysiology, neurodegeneration, and inflammation (“A,T,N,I”), and biological samples to advance the study of cognitively unimpaired older adults at six levels of genetic risk for Alzheimer’s disease (AD) due to their apolipoprotein E (APOE) genotype, including understudied APOE2 and APOE4 homozygotes (HMs) at the lowest and highest risk and those APOE4 HMs and heterozygotes (HTs) who remain unimpaired at older ages due to unknown protective factors and spared pathophysiological effects despite their genetic risk.

To further investigate biomarkers in CSF as possible predictors for mild cognitive impairment and dementia

The purpose of this study is to determine whether Alzheimer's Disease related cognitive trajectories can be identified in midlife and disambiguated from normal aging using serial cognitive measurement.

Additionally, to determine the biofluid and imaging biomarker profiles associated with cognitive trajectories and with eventual conversion to dementia; to determine the effect of genetic characteristics on cognitive decline, biomarkers and disease and health status; to determine the influence of lifestyle and health features that confers risk and resilience to AD; to make data available to local, national and international researchers and to facilitate WRAP participation in linked studies including imaging studies, brain bank, and intervention studies.