Josephine Barnes
Alzheimer's Research UK
United Kingdom
Measuring, Tracking and Disentangling the Impact of White Matter Disease in AD and Mixed Disease: A Longitudinal MRI and CSF Study
Alzheimer's Research UK
327,857
01/08/13
3.5
Alzheimer's disease & other dementias
Multimodal Biomarkers
People with Alzheimers disease (AD) often have evidence of vascular damage in their brains as well as Alzheimers pathology (amyloid and tau). Understanding the relative contributions of each pathology to disease progression is extremely important for numerous reasons. Trials of possible AD treatments are moving to earlier disease stages in order to prevent and halt, rather than treat disease, and even at these earlier stages vascular damage has an impact on progression. Those with more vascular damage may also respond differently to treatments and may have differing prognoses compared with those without such damage. This project will develop techniques to measure and assess the correlates of vascular damage using magnetic resonance imaging. We will make these techniques freely available for other centres to use. We will disentangle the relationships between AD pathology and vascular damage in terms of how each acts to increase disease progression and when each has the greatest influence. In this project we aim to gain understanding of these relationships which will provide better information for those designing clinical trials, for clinicians and also, most importantly, for patients.