Approved research

Imaging genetic analysis towards neurodegenerative disorders development

Lay summary

Neurodegenerative disorders like Alzheimer's disease or Parkinson disease were estimated to affect over 5% of the population !65 years of age. Although clinical diagnosis relies on the presence of dementia, bradykinesia or other clinical features, the underlying molecular pathogenesis involves multiple pathways and mechanisms which also induce non-motor and psychiatric symptoms during decades of disease courses. Recent research into image biomarkers has taken advantage of neuroimaging in which multimodal MRI images have been shown to aid early diagnosis or prediction. Given the complex association across brain images, genetic, molecular and environmental phenotypes, we expect that systematic elaboration of the interaction of the above factors by mathematic modeling of pathological propagation would help outcome prediction and find new disease targets to modify neurodegeneration course. The expected research duration is from 2020 to 2022. We believe only UK Biobank with such a large amount of sample size and rich data types can allow us to approach our scientific goal. All the research results will be published with open access.