The Clinical Core will recruit, diagnose and follow control subjects and patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD) and other dementias. We will provide well-subjects, clinical data and body fluids to investigators at UT Southwestern and other institutions. Our emphases will be (a) recruiting, evaluating and following controls and AD patients, (b) providing to investigators materials for antemortem and postmortem studies, (c) employing SPECT in the differential diagnosis of dementia, (d) increasing service to and data collection from minorities and other under served populations, (e) designing and participating in studies through the Alzheimer's Disease Study Unit (ADSU) and contributing data to the Consortium to Establish a Registry for Alzheimer's Disease (CERAD) (f) educating healthcare professionals in the diagnosis and management of dementing illness, and (g) analyzing and correlating our clinical data with neuropsychological, imaging, CSF and neuropathological findings. We will continue to train and to monitor staff at our North Texas and Northern Oklahoma Satellites, which have given us access to a significant number of African-Americans, Hispanics and Native Americans. We will also encode data and collect CSF for those sites. We will direct vigorous efforts to increasing our recruitment of controls and following patients whom we have evaluated. To maximize patient retention, we will undertake a user satisfaction survey with the Education and Information Transfer (EIT) Core. Our research efforts will be focused, with the help of the Statistics and Data Management (SDM) Core, on analysis of data we gather routinely in patient evaluations, such as assessments of mood and agitation. We will add to our database the CERAD Behavioral Rating Scale for Dementia, and will continue to refine our databasing operation with the help of the SDM Core. We will continue our clinicopathologic conferences cosponsored by the Neuropathology Core.
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