Saturday, May 21, 2022
5/21/2022
PROJECT SUMMARY/ABSTRACT The NIA funded parent project, 1U19AG073172, “Resilience/Resistance to Alzheimer’s Disease in Centenarians and their Offspring (RADCO)” seeks to characterize cognitive resilience or brain resistance to AD and to discover the underlying and hopefully translatable biological mechanisms that enable centenarian cognitive superagers to maintain cognitive function typical of cognitively intact septuagenarians. To address reviewers’ concerns that African Americans (n=88 or 7.2%) are underrepresented in the RADCO sample and that too few centenarians (n=75 or 15% of the total neuroimaged sample) undergo neuroimaging, this administrative supplement application seeks to fund a fourth phenotyping and biospecimen core and neuroimaging core site at Georgia State University (GSU). The GSU site will enhance the diversity of the RADCO cohort by enrolling 234 African Americans, thus increasing the proportion of the RADCO sample that is African American from 7.2% (88/1216) to 22.2% (322/1450). GSU is also able to be a fourth neuroimaging site for RADCO as it has a Prisma MRI platform and routinely performs the key structural and resting state functional pulse sequences that are identical to those used by the three current neuroimaging centers of the Neuroimaging Core as well as the Human Connectome-Aging project. We anticipate that about half (n=103) of the Atlanta-based participants will undergo neuroimaging. Of these 103 additional neuroimaged participants, we estimate 44 will be centenarians. These 44 centenarians added to the RADCO-wide sample of 150 centenarians will bring the proportion of centenarians who are neuroimaged to 34% (194/573). Dr. Vonetta Dotson’s expertise and demonstrated success in engaging the local African American community for enrollment in research studies provides RADCO with the opportunity to substantially increase our African American participant enrollment that will provide an adequately powered sample to discern race-specific differences and similarities in determinants or markers of cognitive superaging. The conduct of this African American participant enrollment effort at GSU provides the added benefit and rare opportunity to collaborate with the Georgia State/Georgia Tech Center for Advanced Brain Imaging (CABI), led by Vince Calhoun, to increase our sample of participants undergoing the rigorously standardized neuroimaging component of the Study.
HHS’ Tracking Accountability in Government Grants System (TAGGS) website provides access to detailed descriptions of grants, loans, aggregated direct payments and other types of financial assistance awarded by the HHS Operating Divisions (OPDIVs) and the Office of the Secretary Staff Divisions (STAFFDIVs).
