Understand Alzheimer's disease characterized by brain imaging phenotype

Indiana University Purdue University

Lay summary

It has been increasingly recognized that Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a complex disease involving multiple factors. Our team has been investigating the effect of comorbidity, medication and genotype on AD risk and whether patients will exhibit early changes in sensory and brain phenotype for years. In particular, we have been investigating multiple brain imaging modalities in AD, which have been widely applied as disease traits of Alzheimer's disease. In this project, we will investigate the association of medical comorbidities, medication and genetic factors with AD risk using multi-modal neuroimaging measures as disease traits. In addition, we will test the power of these different data set in predicting future phenotype changes and diagnosis. With the data from both ADNI and UK Biobank, we expect to replicate our findings with improved power. We expect this project to last 24 months. The results of this project are expected to help with better understanding of AD mechanism and the early detection of AD.