The Rush Alzheimer?s Disease Core Center (Rush ADCC; P30AG10161) supports cutting edge and innovative research on the etiology, pathogenesis, diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of mild cognitive impairment (MCI), Alzheimer's disease (AD), and other common conditions of aging, by providing researchers with a stimulating environment, highly valued clinical and post-mortem data, and ante- and post-mortem biologic specimens. The Rush ADCC supports a variety of timely and important areas of research including risk factors for the transition from normal aging to MCI to AD, the neurobiology of normal aging and MCI, and studies that incorporate contemporary omics technologies and neuroimaging to identify novel therapeutic targets. These research areas are supported through the careful design and integration of seven highly successful Cores: an Administrative Core; Clinical Core; Data Management and Statistics Core; Neuropathology Core; Outreach, Recruitment and Education Core; Religious Orders Study Core, and Latino Core, as well as the Research Education Component. The Rush ADCC and its ancillary studies including the Rush Memory and Aging Project and the Minority Aging Research Study are building a vibrant neuroimaging portfolio of studies, some of which include participants of the Clinical and Religious Orders Study Cores for in-vivo imaging, and in collaboration with the Neuropathology Core for ex-vivo imaging. We are now generating autopsies on persons without dementia who have undergone in-vivo imaging. These are mostly non-Latino whites. Now that we have a relatively large number of African Americans and Latinos in the Clinical and Latino Cores, with a growing number of autopsies, we are in a position to expand this work in the minority communities. The overall goal of the proposed Neuroimaging Core is to generate a resource of neuroimaging data from the Rush ADCC African Americans and Latinos, and affiliated studies, and provide neuroimaging expertise to facilitate high quality, cutting edge, externally-funded research focusing on the transition from normal aging to mild cognitive impairment (MCI) to the earliest stages of Alzheimer?s disease (AD) and other dementias. The proposed Neuroimaging Core will markedly extend the ability of the Rush ADCC to interrogate neuroimaging as part of its clinical-imaging-multi-level omics-pathology pipeline supporting studies of the transition from normal aging to MCI to the earliest stages of dementia, and studies of ante- and post-mortem biospecimens, and extend this work into the African American and Latino communities which are vastly under- represented.
The development of robust biomarkers is a major priority in AD research. The proposed Neuroimaging Core, in collaboration with the Rush ADCC ancillary studies, will generate a truly unique resource of ante-mortem imaging from African American and Latino persons with ante-mortem biofluids who come to brain autopsy without dementia. This resource will enable linking brain omics, to biofluid omics to brain pathology, neuroimaging, and cognitive and motor function in minorities to complement a similar resource of non-Latino whites that we are currently generating; we will make this resource available to the wide aging and AD research community.
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