DEMO · Dementia modelling

Dementia modelling

Dementia constitutes a major burden on society, both in monetary costs and the suffering of patients and relatives. Alzheimer’s disease (AD), the most common form of dementia, is one of the most devastating healthcare problems faced by western society. The prevalence increases with the average lifetime year by year, and in most countries the population is aging. Different types of dementia require different treatments. Cardiovascular treatments may, e.g., prevent or slow vascular dementia (VaD), which is the second most common type of dementia. There are currently no disease-modifying treatments for AD, despite numerous promising drugs in development. Another challenge is that many of the dementias have clinically similar presentations and may co-exist (as many as 50% of AD patients may have VaD as well), making clinical diagnosis challenging. However, signs of dementia-related pathology are measurable using biomarkers far before clinical presentation, and the various types of dementia have quite different pathological bases. The overall objective of the Dementia Modeling (DeMo) project is to develop new models for AD, VaD and mixed AD and VaD progression using, among others, novel imaging biomarkers of vascular pathology alongside already established AD imaging biomarkers. Such models enable identification and differentiation of at-risk subjects for effective treatment, and they can be used to assess disease progression for among others treatment monitorization. The project emphasizes the use of historically widely used MRI scan types to enable use of historical imaging data in modeling. Algorithms are simultaneously developed for (1) robust disease progression modeling, and for the underlying necessary brain imaging biomarkers of VaD to be measured at each time point and entered to the disease progression model; i.e., (2) white matter lesion imaging biomarkers and (3) vascular pathology imaging biomarkers. Three early stage researchers (ESRs) are trained while performing these three objectives (1-3) of the project.

Data: CORDIS, © European Union