2017 — 2018 |
Goldstein, Felicia C. [⬀] Loring, David W. |
R03Activity Code Description: To provide research support specifically limited in time and amount for studies in categorical program areas. Small grants provide flexibility for initiating studies which are generally for preliminary short-term projects and are non-renewable. |
Remote Ambulatory Cognitive Assessment of African American and Caucasian Adults
PROJECT SUMMARY Challenges exist in recruiting and retaining minorities in research on Alzheimer?s disease (AD), thereby limiting the ability to elucidate mechanisms for health disparities in AD risk and to adequately measure treatment efficacy in underserved populations. African Americans represent an especially important group to target for research due to their two-fold risk of AD compared to non-Hispanic Caucasians. Advances in technology to evaluate cognitive functioning, particularly the use of mobile applications such as smartphones, offer the promise for overcoming barriers that may limit African American research participation including scheduling difficulties, associated study costs, and examinee/examiner cultural mismatches. Remotely administered neuropsychological measures can be performed at an individual?s convenience, and outcomes can be collected at multiple time points. In the proposed R03 study, we will leverage the resources and volunteers who have signed up for a new community initiative at our institution, the Emory Healthy Aging Study, involving remote engagement of individuals through smartphone technology. The Co-PIs have selected tasks from the cognitive neuroscience literature that are non-proprietary and have strong behavioral and neuroimaging correlates in APOE-?4 carriers, amnestic mild cognitive impairment and AD patients, and healthy aging groups. The proposed grant will pilot these measures when administered via smartphones to middle-aged and older African Americans and Caucasians, with the overall goal of determining whether group differences exist that could have diagnostic relevance in future studies. Sixty African American and 60 non-Hispanic Caucasian adults 45-75 years of age will complete the traditional versions and the smartphone adaptations of the cognitive measures in the clinic setting and will then complete the smartphone applications remotely at 3 and 6 months post-baseline assessment. Specific Aims are to 1) Establish reliability of the smartphone applications (both internal consistency and in comparison to the traditional version (inter-modality reliability)) 2) Establish test- retest reliability of the smartphone measures; and 3) Assess adherence rates of the remotely administered smartphone measures. A secondary Aim is to examine factors (i.e., quality of education, socioeconomic status, and vascular comorbidities) that we expect to be correlated with performance on cognitive measures administered via smartphones and that are underlying factors often associated with cognitive performance differences between African Americans and Caucasians. The long-term goal of a future study is to validate these mobile cognitive measures against neuroimaging, genetic, and CSF biomarkers of central amyloidosis.
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1 |
2020 — 2021 |
Bauer, Russell M (co-PI) [⬀] Bilder, Robert M [⬀] Drane, Daniel L (co-PI) [⬀] Loring, David W. Umfleet, Laura Glass (co-PI) [⬀] |
R01Activity Code Description: To support a discrete, specified, circumscribed project to be performed by the named investigator(s) in an area representing his or her specific interest and competencies. |
National Neuropsychological Network (Nnn) @ University of California Los Angeles
Project Summary This proposal aims to develop a National Neuropsychology Network (NNN), starting with four clinical research sites in California, Florida, Georgia, and Wisconsin. The NNN aims to gather clinical diagnostic information following a shared protocol, collect item-level data on representative neuropsychological (NP) instruments, and deposit these data in the NIMH Data Archive (NDA; https://data-archive.nimh.nih.gov/), more specifically in the Research Domains Criteria database (RDoCdb). The infrastructure established in the network focuses on point- of-testing data acquisition, using iPads, leveraging existing technology developed by a leading test vendor (Q- interactive, from Pearson), and developing additional software to collect specific additional measures that are widely used in clinical neuropsychology laboratories and clinics but which are not available elsewhere. The NNN will collect data on more than 10,000 cases over 4 years, representing a broad range of neuropsychiatric disorders, reflecting populations seen nationwide, and then deposit all data in RDoCdb. Data analyses will specify the latent constructs underlying each test, the factors represented by larger batteries, and create proposals for new individual tests and batteries. Novel tests (short forms and adaptive tests) will be suggested based on item-response theory modeling of each test, with desired precision of measurement for evidence- based clinical decision-making. Novel battery proposals will be informed by examining the positive and negative predictive power of each test to contribute to key differential diagnostic questions that arise in NP assessment. Both battery and individual test proposals will focus on efficiency, and are expected to yield at least a doubling of efficiency. The NNN aims to serve as a nucleus and template for additional network nodes, that will in its next generation offer a national platform for co-norming novel tests, expanding to other languages, and ultimately designing new procedures that are validated with respect to both brain function and real world adaptive capacities.
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0.966 |