The UC Davis Alzheimer's Disease Center (ADCC) represents a collaborative effort by investigators and clinicians at the University of California, Davis and the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory. For the past 5 years, these groups have been working together using a variety of techniques to study patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD). The overall scientific goal of this program, relating the neurobehavioral features of the disease to its neurobiology, will be advanced by the ADCC, which will integrate and expand a host of clinical and research activities currently ongoing. Important aspects of the program include careful and uniform cognitive and behavioral evaluations of a large cohort of patients and control subjects, yearly longitudinal follow-up, ultimate neuropathological examination, and management of a data base containing all of this information. The program will utilize 5 existing clinics to refer patients to the ADCC. Two of these referral clinics with a long history of collaboration are State of California funded Alzheimer's Disease Diagnostic and Treatment Centers (ADDTCs), located in Berkeley and Sacramento. Patients will also be referred from two county hospital clinics and a VA hospital clinic. This integrated network will make the ADCC accessible to a large and diverse population extending from the San Francisco Bay Area through the Central Valley to the Sierra Foothills and the Oregon border. In order to accommodate this large geographic catchment area, the ADCC will have two clinical performance sites in Berkeley and Sacramento, utilizing shared personnel and joint training and clinical activities to ensure uniformity of data collection. This system will be supervised by a centralized administrative core to ensure maintenance of clinical, programmatic, and scientific goals. Clinical data, comprising the results of the history, physical and neurological examination, laboratory evaluation, neuroimaging results, and the detailed behavioral and cognitive assessment, will be collected, coded, stored, and analyzed uniformly. This data base, available to all investigators, will greatly enhance the capacity for collaborative projects. Neuropathological examination will be ensured by longitudinal follow-up and enhancement of a system which has already proven effective. Autopsy services will be provided locally, with quickly dispatched dissectors available to process tissue for a number of types of studies. All tissue will be studied in Sacramento, with detailed and quantitative neuropathological results entered into the data base. Tissue processed in a number of ways will also be available to investigators. These collective functions of the ADCC will be enhanced through activities focused upon training researchers and clinicians, promoting the ADCC within the University and community in order to recruit new investigators and patients, and increasing interactions between researchers, clinicians, and members of the University community in general.
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