Novel Approaches to Dementia Heterogeneity

The overall long term goal of this Imaging Core is to identify structural, perfusion, and metabolic changes in the brain that predict future cognitive decline and conversion to dementia. The overall approach will be to initially study healthy elders and age/gender matched patients with well-characterized dementia associated with Alzheimer’s disease and Frontotemporal dementia using a newly acquired 4 Tesla Bruker/Siemens MRI/MRS scanner, which will be optimized for investigation of neurodegenerative disease. These initial studies will provide imaging characteristics of established dementia. We will also study a group of subjects with MCI-Peterson criteria. In subsequent years we will study increasing numbers of subjects with MCI subtypes and MCI-Peterson who likely represent early stages of AD and FTD and who are expected to ultimately convert to dementia. All subjects will be recruited and evaluated by the Clinical Core.