Grant: Doctoral Award - Frederick Banting and Charles Best Canada Graduate Scholarships

Currently 500,000 Canadians suffer from Alzheimer's disease (AD) and the elderly are Canada's fastest growing demographic group. Within 20 years 1.1 million Canadians will suffer from AD, raising the cost from $15 billion to $153 billion, and the number of hours of informal support by family and support networks from 231 million to 756 million hours. Strategies that either delay the disease onset, the conversion from prodromal stages to full AD, or that prevent the disease altogether would have a significant effect on the Canadian and, eventually, worldwide healthcare systems and would confer significant savings to the costs detailed above. Our goal is to develop a method that efficiently analyzes AD-specific measures of brain shape and volume alongside genetic data in order to identify relationships between them. The main obstacle to combining imaging and genetics data is the sheer volume of data available for analysis. To ameliorate this problem, we propose the utilization of an AD-risk gene network with heritable brain structure to classify diagnoses between healthy, mild cognitive impairment and AD individuals. Combining both refined genetic and phenotypic biomarkers will allow for early identification of individuals at high risk for AD which could result in the initiation of treatments that either delay or halt the progression of AD altogether. We believe this is an innovative proposal that addresses the urgent need for the discovery of novel biomarkers. This application combines a number of cutting edge technologies in a new way to identify genetic markers that identify individuals at high risk of AD before the onset of the disease. This proposal will have tremendous impact on health care systems in terms of burden and money saved, on the lives of community and family caregivers, and the patients themselves.