Investigator: Brandon Ally, PhD
Project Title: Activation in the Posterior Association Cortex as a Therapeutic Marker
Finding a reliable and cost-effective measure to determine a patient’s response to a memory-enhancing medication could help clinicians know which patients are responding to a particular drug, in addition to providing new clinical outcome trial measures that can be used in novel drug discovery. This proposal will determine whether a component of the event-related potential (ERP) waveform associated with episodic memory performance can be used as a physiologic measure of response to drug therapy in early Alzheimer's disease (AD). Enhanced memory performance is indicated by a robust activation in the posterior association cortex (PAC) of the brain. This area is of special interest as recent research suggests that the earliest AD pathology may occur in the PAC. The aims of this project are twofold: (1) to determine whether the activity in the PAC is improved with cholinergic therapy in patients with mild AD, and (2) to determine whether enhanced activity in the PAC from cholinergic therapy correlates with improvement on standard neuropsychological tests of cognitive function in patients with mild AD.
Investigator: Isabel Carreras, PhD
Project Title: Relationship between Clusterin and Abeta Aggregation in a Mouse Model of AD
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