The Clinical Core provides expertise in the clinical and biological characterization of individuals with cognitive loss and dementia and the ability to identify non-impaired older individuals. This expertise is utilized to recruit and maintain a cohort of well-characterized participants to support a broad array of dementia and cognitive research conducted within the MSADRC, the Mount Sinai Health System (MSHS,) and national initiatives such as the National Alzheimer's Coordinating Center (NACC), the Genome Wide Alzheimer's Study (GWAS), Alzheimer's Disease Cooperative Studies (ADCS), and the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI). The role of the core is to develop and implement clinical procedures for the high standard characterization of elders spanning the spectrum of normal, prodromal, and various stages of affected subjects into research-ready cohorts. The Clinical Core provides subjects, tissue, and data for studies as well as clinical research expertise related to clinical manifestations of disease, disease course, treatment responses, and recruitment feasibility to help guide the design and implementation of studies within the Center and broadly within the MSHS. Within the Center, the Clinical Core provides the essentials for research: the subjects and their clinical characterization to participate in Projects 1 and 2; the clinical characterization of subjects who provide brain donations and other specimens disseminated to the Neuropathology Core and Center's projects, and local and national research. The Core innovates in the development of assessment tools; application of assessments to new populations; adaptation of new imaging technologies into the clinical `real world'; and clinical trials of novel, under-studied or repurposed compounds. The Core has a rich and successful history of outreach to groups underrepresented in dementia research and provisions to continue this are built into this application. The Core is active in training young investigators and supporting investigators from other fields who wish to study cognition in their clinical populations.
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