Project Overview

By the time a person receives a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) dementia, brain atrophy is such that memory impairments are irreversible. The scientific community is joining forces to collect and share data on the pre-dementia phases of AD (preclinical and prodromal AD). Neuroscientists require a large pool of longitudinal data on well-characterized individuals to develop clinical tools to identify who will develop AD dementia and provide evidence to support the development of new interventions that could stop or slow down AD. Scientific discoveries also need to be shared with clinicians to improve Canadian health.

The goal of this application is to support the human and technological infrastructure needed to collect, harmonize, store and safely share a large amount of data on cognitively unimpaired individuals with AD pathology. The Canadian Alzheimer’s Prevention Data Repository and Sharing platform (CAP platform) will be the first Canadian platform with the infrastructure to acquire, harmonize and share sensitive data on preclinical AD with the scientific community at no cost. This platform will also facilitate data exchange with healthcare practitioners. Data will be harmonized with other major Canadian and international AD initiatives to facilitate data amalgamation on preclinical AD. Data will come from several sources including PREVENT-AD cohort, which started in 2011 and has collected >2000 cognitive evaluations, >2000 multimodal MRI, >1500 blood samples, >2000 lifestyle/behavioral evaluations, >500 CSF samples and >400 PET scans on 692 participants from which 425 have follow-up visits. We will also launch a dementia prevention clinic in 2023 with the support from philanthropy and the CIUSSS Ouest-de-l’Ile. The clinic will use our CAP platform and therefore feed our data repository. Other Canadian and international investigators performing research on the preclinical phase of AD will also use this resource. Our goal is to accelerate research on AD and related treatments.

Principal Investigator

Sylvia Villeneuve , Douglas Hospital Research Centre
(McGill University)

Partners and Donors

Optina

FRQS

Douglas Institute Foundation

NIH