The overall goal of the Rush ADCC Clinical Core is to continue to provide an infrastructure to support high quality, cutting edge, clinical and clinical-pathologic studies of MCI, AD and other dementias. For most of the first three funding cycles, the Clinical Core focused on enrolling large numbers of persons for longitudinal epidemiologic studies. More than 2,600 persons were enrolled in one or more externally funded research studies, including more than 600 racial and ethnic minorities. Beginning in 2003, the core has focused its efforts on longitudinal detailed clinical evaluation on a subset of these persons, with an emphasis on racial and ethnic minorities, and non-AD dementias, to support clinical-pathologic studies. To date, 749 persons have agreed to annual clinical evaluation, including 243 racial and ethnic minorities. A total of 593 of these persons have agreed to brain autopsy of whom 466 died and 389 (83%) had a brain autopsy. Of 47 minorities who died, 31 (66%) had an autopsy, a rate much higher than the autopsy rate for minorities among the AD Centers program as a whole. The surviving persons in this cohort have all agreed to annual clinical evaluation using the new Uniform Data Set (UDS) proposed by the Clinical Task Force of NACC. The proposed core will continue to build on its success during the past funding period and by recruiting and performing annual evaluations on minorities with MCI and dementia with an emphasis on obtaining autopsy. In addition, it will recruit and perform annual evaluations on persons with non AD dementias (Lewy body disease, frontotemporal dementia) who agree to annual evaluation and brain donation at death. The continuation of this Core for five more years will provide investigators at Rush and the AD research community at large a resource of biologic specimens from racial and ethnic minorities for clinical-pathologic studies, in addition to biologic specimens from non-AD dementia.
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