2004 — 2005 |
Purohit, Dushyant P |
R21Activity Code Description: To encourage the development of new research activities in categorical program areas. (Support generally is restricted in level of support and in time.) |
Age-Related Cognitive Loss in Mumbai, India @ Mount Sinai School of Medicine of Nyu
This R21 grant is designed to develop and facilitate collaborative research capabilites for studies on age-related cognitive loss at the TN Medical College/ Nair Hospital in Mumbai (Bombay), India, working in conjunction with the Mount Sinai School of Medicine Alzheimer's Disease Research Center (ADRC). This collaboration will involve experienced senior faculty at Mount Sinai who have long experience in research on Alzheimer's disease and other age-related neurodegenerative diseases. We propose to work with Dr. Charles Pinto, Professor of Psychiatry at the TN Medical College, one of the few Indian medical academic figures who has initiated an ongoing research program on age-related cognitive disorders. The targeted population for this collaborative study lives in Mumbai (Bombay), one of the largest urban populations in the world. The proposed research collaboration is of particular importance when one recognizes that India, the second most populous country in the developing world, has a very rapidly growing elderly population. We propose to modify existing screening instruments to be practical and culturally appropriate and use them to identify cases with impaired cognitive function. We will also assist in developing and implimenting culturally appropriate neuropsychological cognitive assessment tools and clinical diagnostic protocols for use in dementia research at the TN Medical College. Personnel at the TN Medical College will be trained in using these assessment instruments and generating data on cognitive function in a standardized fashion. Capacity for modern database operation with computerized data entry and storage will also be achieved. We will assist in the creation of the infrastructure and procedures needed to establish a Brain Bank facility in Mumbai. Using this facility, we will collect brains from elderly individuals coming to autopsy and evaluate them for the extent and distribution of Alzheimer's disease-related lesions. These specimens will be compared to age-matched specimens derived from New York to determine if there are differences in the tendency to develop such lesions in the two populations. The capabilities and preliminary data emerging from this R21 grant will be used to organize a proposal for more long-term studies of age-related cognitive loss in Mumbai utilizing the collaborative arrangements developed through the work of the current proposal. We anticipate that these studies will emphasize cliniconeuropathologic investigations in parallel with ongoing research at the Mount Sinai ADRC.
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0.991 |
2006 — 2010 |
Purohit, Dushyant P |
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. |
Age Related Cognitive Loss in Mumbai, India @ Mount Sinai School of Medicine of Nyu
[unreadable] DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): This project is designed to further develop and facilitate collaborative research on age-related cognitive loss at the TN Medical College/Nair Hospital in Mumbai (Bombay) India, working in conjunction with the Mount Sinai Alzheimer's Disease Research Center (ADRC). This collaboration was initiated through support of an R21 Developmental Grant under the Brain Disorders in the Developing World: Research Across the Lifespan initiative. We now propose a more extensive RO1 grant to further develop the capabilities of our Indian colleagues to carry out research clinical evaluations and longitudinal assessments of cognitive function in the elderly as well as the preparation of postmortem brain specimens for neuropathologic diagnosis and brain banking. Epidemiologic studies of elderly Indian populations indicate that prevalence rates for Alzheimer's are dramatically lower than are seen in the developed nations. In this project, we will enroll, clinically assess, diagnose and longitudinally follow a cohort of 150 elderly individuals from Mumbai with mild to moderate cognitive impairment as well as a comparative group of 100 normal elderly controls. In addition, we will develop a facility for performing neuropathologic characterization and diagnostic evaluation of clinically evaluated subjects who come to autopsy during the course of the study. In doing this we will characterize the clinical features, natural history and neuropathologic correlates of cognitive loss among the urban elderly inhabitants of Mumbai. Finally, we will collect brain specimens from 120 elderly subjects from Mumbai who come to autopsy and are free of cognitive impairment (based on a postmortem Clinical Dementia Rating Score or CDR of 0). These brains will be compared with an age-matched series of brains obtained from the Mount Sinai Brain Bank collection (CDR=0) for the extent and distribution of neurofibrillary tangles and beta- amyloid deposits in the form of senile plaques, diffuse plaques and vascular amyloid accumulations. In this way, we will determine if, as our preliminary data suggest, in the course of normal aging the inhabitants of Mumbai show a decreased tendency to develop these cardinal neuropathologic features of Alzheimer's disease. In carrying out this project it is our overall objective to develop a center of expertise in research on age-related cognitive loss in Mumbai. The methodology we propose is patterned on that of the Clinical, Neuropathology, Database, and Education and Information Transfer Cores of the Mount Sinai ADRC, an established, effective and highly productive NIA-funded ADRC. [unreadable] [unreadable] [unreadable]
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