The primary goal of this five-year training award is to further the development of the candidate's expertise as a researcher and medical clinician in the following areas: 1) Imaging of functional brain systems in Alzheimer's disease and other dementias; 2) relationships between risk for Alzheimer's Disease (AD), functional brain system patterns, and neuropchycholgical test performance; and 3) clinical research design, methodologies, and statistical analysis techniques used in the evaluation of these relationships. The superceding career goals of this candidate are to improve the understanding of brain systems involved in dementia, develop diagnostic tools for early intervention in degenerative dementing diseases while functioning as a clinician researcher. The proposed training will include structured coursework and expert mentoring in clinical dementia, functional imaging, statistics and neuropsychology. The research project that will be adjunct to this training has an overall aim of conducting a five-year study of non-demented adults over a wide age range (30-50yrs) in an effort to identify reliable patterns of altered brain function and correlate those changes to the underlying hemodynamic response in individuals at higher risk for AD. The primary aims of this study are to answer the following questions: 1) What is the age variances of Blood Oxygen Level Dependency (BOLD) signal in AD risk? 2) Does this BOLD signal correlate to differences in underlying cerebral blood perfusion?, and 3) Does the variance in BOLD signal therefore representative pathology in underlying neuronal activity? The proposed study will evaluate variance in activation BOLD signal in relationship to baseline and activation perfusion, measured by Arterial Spin Labeling Functional MRI. Neuropsychological testing will be performed to evaluate for substantial group differences. Based on our previous pilot studies each participant will be imaged on a 3T MRI scanner while performing a verbal associate episodic memory task. This training program will allow this candidate to transition from a postdoctoral research fellow to an independent investigator and clinician in the field of geriatric neurology in the UCSD Department of Neurosciences, and provide the foundation for a clinical and research career focused on dementia pathology, treatment and diagnosis.
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