Grant: Project Grant

Dementia is an emerging public health crisis, with 150 million people predicted to develop dementia worldwide by 2050. In Canada, dementia is predicted to affect approximately 3% of the population by 2038. Alzheimer's Disease (AD) is the most common cause of dementia, which causes progressive loss of brain function over time. Many patients initially present with a milder form of the condition, known as mild cognitive impairment (MCI). It is known that a large proportion of patients with MCI will experience worsening of their memory and eventually progress to a diagnosis of AD. Patients with MCI thus represent the earliest stages of the disease continuum, and are therefore ideal candidates for new treatments aimed at preventing disease progression. A biomarker is defined as a characteristic which can be objectively measured to quantify the presence and severity of human disease. Biomarkers play an essential role in the development of new treatments for MCI and AD, given the need for objective measures of disease progression in clinical trials. However, existing biomarkers for MCI and AD have significant limitations. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is fast, noninvasive, and widely available - and therefore holds substantial promise for the development of novel biomarkers for AD progression. We have developed a new MRI analysis method which can detect changes in patients with MCI which are not detected with existing techniques. Our exciting preliminary data suggest this method detects abnormalities in patients with MCI and AD, which are correlated with existing (invasive) biomarkers and severity of cognitive impairment. However, these initial experiments were performed in a small cohort of subjects - which precludes definitive correlation with cognitive function. In the present grant, we aim to evaluate the potential direct clinical relevance of these findings by applying our methods in a large open-access database of subjects with MCI and AD.