The School of Medicine will receive $5.9 million over the course of five years to begin an ambitious and potentially decades-long search for the earliest signs that a seemingly normal person may someday develop Alzheimer’s disease.
“The brain changes that cause Alzheimer’s disease begin many years before they culminate in dementia, the symptom that brings most patients in for diagnosis,” said John C. Morris, M.D., director of the University’s Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center (ADRC) and principal investigator for the grant from the National Institute on Aging.
“By the time of diagnosis, there has already been so much brain damage that any treatment we start is unlikely to be effective at restoring patients.”
To make it possible to detect Alzheimer’s disease before it progresses to the level of dementia, ADRC scientists are using the grant to fund the “Adult Children Study.”
Scientists plan to conduct comprehensive health assessments every three years of two groups each comprising 120 participants: people with at least one parent with Alzheimer’s, and a control group of people whose parents never had Alzheimer’s. Volunteers in both groups will be cognitively normal and between the ages of 45-74.
“We will evaluate not only clinical symptoms such as memory changes and personality changes, but also genetic factors, neuropsychiatric performance and several different kinds of brain imaging,” Morris said. “We will also look at the levels of various proteins that are suspected to be linked to Alzheimer’s in the blood and the cerebrospinal fluid.”
The short-term goal of the study, likely to be completed in the initial five-year funding period, will be to determine whether the adult children of parents with Alzheimer’s have more of the potential early indicators of Alzheimer’s disease than the control group.
Over the long term, researchers hope to develop a battery of tests that clinicians can use to weigh the chances that a patient will eventually develop Alzheimer’s.
Currently, the best treatments for Alzheimer’s can only slow the progress of the disease. However, Morris noted that under way at the ADRC are clinical trials of new agents that may be able to stop the brain mechanisms that cause Alzheimer’s disease.
“Ideally, we’d one day like to identify patients many years before clinical onset and put them on treatments that can stop the disease,” he said.
If any volunteers develop Alzheimer’s disease during the study, they will be switched to yearly evaluations at the ADRC.
Scientists began recruitment and initial evaluations of participants in October. They are close to meeting their goals for adult children of Alzheimer’s but are still looking for participants for the control group whose parents did not develop Alzheimer’s.