A Population-Based Risk Study of Alzheimer’s Disease - Older Latino adults in the US are at a greater risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and related dementias (ADRD). They exhibit a faster cognitive decline than other demographic groups. There is a lack of population-based data to characterize risk factors associated with progressive cognitive dysfunction in Latino populations. A better understanding of the epidemiology of ADRD in Latino communities can provide better treatment and design appropriate preventive strategies for reducing disease risk. Since older Latino adults have a higher prevalence of cardiovascular risk factors, their risk of developing ADRD is high in old age. Emerging evidence suggests that neuroinflammation contributes to ADRD risk, and understanding these pathways in Latino populations is critical. This grant proposal aims to engage and develop the infrastructure for a new Latino cohort study with the following aims: (1) build infrastructure, community outreach, and the external advisory board for a new Latino cohort; (2) develop ongoing engagement with the community and resource sharing plan; (3) perform neurological assessments in 300 Latino participants from East Side community in Chicago; and (4) test the hypotheses that Latino participants have a higher prevalence of clinically diagnosed AD and MCI, and to test whether the genetic association of the ApoE4 allele with clinically diagnosed AD and MCI is similar to that observed in the non-Hispanic White individuals. We will also test whether neuroinflammatory processes contribute to ADRD risk in Latinos compared to non-Hispanic whites. The long-term objective is to add 1,000 Latino individuals from the East Side Community to our existing Chicago Health and Aging Project (CHAP), a population-based community study in four neighborhoods (Beverly, Morgan Park, Mt. Greenwood, and Washington Heights) that has 10,801 participants with 63% non-Hispanic Black and 37% non-Hispanic white participants. Expanding our population-based epidemiological study to include Latino individuals will allow us to test biological and psychosocial hypotheses of high public health significance across multiple populations. The collection of biospecimens will also enable further testing of blood biomarker hypotheses, the development of an omics pipeline, and the provision of additional infrastructure for pathology studies in a population-based cohort study of Latino and other high-risk populations.
