Establish Taiwan Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative - a Three-year Pilot Study
Status:
Unknown status
Trial end date:
2015-01-01
Target enrollment:
Participant gender:
Summary
Alzheimer's disease (AD) may be one of the most pressing problems facing all countries around
the world as the population ages.AD is a slowly evolving process that likes begins years to
decades before the clinical symptoms area manifest. However, as one would like to identify
the disease process at an earlier point in the clinical continuum, the precision of the
diagnosis is reduced. Therefore, the challenge is to try to identify the process at the
pre-dementia stage and enhance the specificity of the clinical diagnosis through the use of
imaging and other biomarkers. Mild cognitive impairment (MCI) represents an attempt to
characterize subjects at an early clinical phase of AD and subjects with MCI have been a
target for prevention trials. There are two pathological landmarks, in terms of
extra-cellular senile plaques and intracellular neurofibrillary tangles. Although present
symptomatic treatments provide some benefit to patients with AD, they are not the solution
for AD. Up to date, there are still no therapies can alter the underlying nature of the AD
process. Therefore, the earlier the intervention takes place, presumably, the greater the
protection against further neuronal damage will be appreciated.The Alzheimer's Disease
Neuroimaging Initiate (ADNI) is a consortium of universities and medical centers in the
United States and Canada established to develop standardized imaging techniques and
biomarkers procedures in normal subjects, subjects with MCI and subjects with mild AD. ADNI
has been a groundbreaking project, establishing pre-competitive collaboration and real-time
data sharing among academia and industry investigators to clarify the relationships among
demographic, genetic, clinical, cognitive, neuroimaging and biochemical measures throughout
the course of AD neurobiology, in order to facilitate the development of effective
therapeutics.This project has exceeded expectations, providing insights into disease
mechanisms as well as hugely valuable advances, based primarily on the use of standardized
biomarkers, to drug development programs. A number of the leading disease-modifying drug
development programs are now employing ADNI methodology toward more efficient trial design,
particularly in the critically important early (pre-dementia) AD population