The overarching goal of the Clinical Core is to characterize the behavioral, cognitive, motor, neuroimaging, proteomic and genetic features of ADRC subjects in novel, multidisciplinary ways, and facilitate enrollment of subjects in studies of normal and abnormal aging.
The specific aims of the Clinical Core are to 1) Recruit, evaluate, and longitudinally follow cohorts of normal elderly (n=300), patients with mild cognitive impairment (MCI;n=150), mild AD (n=100), frontotemporal lobar degeneration (FTLD;n=75), HIV (n=50), amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS;n=20), corticobasal degeneration and progressive supranuclear palsy (CBD/PSP; n=25), and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD;n=20), and members of families with known mutations in genes that predispose them to FTLD;2) Work with the Education Core to recruit, evaluate, and longitudinally follow Chinese-American (n=100) and Latino (n=50) patients and controls;3) Provide clinical data and well characterized subjects for research on aging and neurodegenerative disease;and 4) Obtain biological samples for genomic and proteomic research, and contributing novel cohorts, including Chinese-American and FTLD patients, to the National Cell Repository for AD (NCRAD). All subjects will be evaluated using the UDS plus several neurological, cognitive, and personality measures specific to UCSF to better understand the heterogeneity of and overlap between dementias, improve our ability to capture the very earliest signs of neurodegeneration, study the transition from normal aging to MCI, and facilitate interventions.
The prevalence of dementing disorders will soon reach epidemic proportions in the United States. By recruiting and assessing a broad range of patients and elderly controls, the Clinical Core of this ADRC plays a central role in this ADRC's ability to promote the interventional, translational, and biological research in dementias necessary to develop new treatments and optimize patient care.
Showing the most recent 10 out of 590 publications
