The faculty and staff of the Clinical Core will continue to recruit, enroll, examine and characterize patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD) and normal controls yearly in the Patient/Control Registry of the Boston University Alzheimer's Disease Center. In addition to clinical characterization, blood will be collected for the Molecular Core, and participants/family members in the Patient/Control Registry will be asked to consider brain donation for participants at the time of death for the Neuropathology Core. In addition to maintaining the current high autopsy rate among participants who die in the community. The Clinical Core will also continue to recruit family and professional caregivers into a special Caregiver Registry. With the permission of the registrants, data and participants from the Patient/Control Registry and the Caregiver Registry are made available to qualified investigators in AD and related areas in order to enhance their research success. Finally, the Clinical Core supports the mission and efforts of other Cores, particularly the Education core. In the first funding period of the BU ADC, the Clinical Core has demonstrated strengths in enrolling and utilizing late-stage AD patients in clinical research, and in reaching out to recruit participants from among the urban, underprivileged, minority communities immediately surrounding the Boston Medical Center. Productive scientific collaborations with numerous clinical and basic science investigators have resulted from the utilization of Clinical Core data. In this renewal, we propose to continue the expansion of the Clinical Core at Boston Medical Center and to build upon our recruiting and retention successes in the African American communities of Boston. We further propose to expand our affiliation with the Franmingham Heart Study in order to help collect longitudinal clinical data and pursue clinico-pathological correlations in persons who participate in this unique longitudinal, multi- generation population based study.
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