Funding Success to Identify Early Stages of Dementia
Senior Research Fellow Dr Simone Reppermund and colleagues from UNSW Sydney’s Centre for Healthy Brain Ageing (CHeBA) have been awarded close to $1.3 million to develop an online tool designed to assist in the identification of early stages of dementia.
The funding, awarded by the NHMRC Medical Research Future Fund, will allow for the development, validation and implementation of a new, computerised diagnostic tool to assess instrumental activities of daily living in older people with cognitive impairment.
Instrumental activities of daily living are complex everyday activities necessary to live independently such as shopping or managing medications and finances.
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IMAGE: Tau accumulation over one year measured in composite A) mesial temporal ROI; and B) temporoparietal ROI in cognitively unimpaired participants (blue) and cognitively impaired participants (red). The CI group included. view more
Credit: Image created by N Krishnadas et al. Florey Department of Neurosciences & Mental Health, The University of Melbourne; Department of Molecular Imaging & Therapy, Austin Hospital, Melbourne.
Reston, VA (Embargoed until 7:30 p.m. EDT, Monday, June 14, 2021) A novel positron emission tomography (PET) radiotracer has been shown to effectively measure increases in brain tau a distinguishing characteristic of Alzheimer s disease before any symptoms of the disease are observed. With the potential to measure increases in tau over a long period of time, this tracer offers an important tool to assess the effectiveness of Alzheimer s disease treatments in clinical trials. This research was presented at the Society of Nuclear Medicine