Dementia Paid Clinical Trials in Illinois

Aim 1: To demonstrate the feasibility by determining proportion of completed medication reconciliation, Central Nervous System active Potentially Inappropriate Medication (CNS PIM) use among patients with Alzheimer's Disease and Related Dementias (ADRD) and Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) in the emergency department (ED), and communication between ED clinical pharmacists and outpatient prescribers. Aim 2: To demonstrate the feasibility of collecting the primary and secondary outcomes for a subsequent study. The future primary outcome will be reduction in CNS PIMs 90 days after an ED visit. Secondary outcomes will include outpatient follow-up, repeat ED visits, and hospitalizations during the 90 days following an ED visit. Aim 3: To demonstrate the acceptability of the PRIDE intervention to outpatient clinicians using the Acceptability of Intervention Measure and qualitative analysis of responses. Read Less

This current translational project, funded by NIH, aims to better understand the impact of various signal modification strategies for older adults with Alzheimer's dementia and its potential precursor, known as amnestic mild cognitive impairment. The investigators hypothesize that adults with Alzheimer's dementia represent an extreme case of restricted cognitive ability, such that very low working memory capacity and overall reduced cognitive capacity will limit benefit from advanced signal processing. Thus, the investigators hypothesize that adults with Alzheimer's dementia will receive greater benefit from acoustically simple, high-fidelity hearing aid processing that minimally alters the acoustic signal. Read Less

The overall goal of the DISCOVERY study is to better understand what factors contribute to changes in cognitive (i.e., thinking and memory) abilities in patients who experienced a stroke. The purpose of the study is to help doctors identify patients at risk for dementia (decline in memory, thinking and other mental abilities that significantly affects daily functioning) after their stroke so that future treatments may be developed to improve outcomes in stroke patients. For this study, a "stroke" is defined as either (1) an acute ischemic stroke (AIS, or blood clot in the brain), (2) an intracerebral hemorrhage (ICH, or bleeding in the brain), (3) or an aneurysmal subarachnoid hemorrhage (aSAH, or bleeding around the brain caused by an abnormal bulge in a blood vessel that bursts). The investigators hypothesize that: 1. The size, type and location of the stroke play an important role in recovery of thinking and memory abilities after stroke, and pre-existing indicators of brain health further determine the extent of this recovery. 2. Specific stroke events occurring in individuals with underlying genetic or biological risk factors can cause further declines in brain heath, leading to changes in thinking and memory abilities after stroke. 3. Studying thinking and memory alongside brain imaging and blood samples in patients who have had a stroke allows for earlier identification of declining brain health and development of individualized treatment plans to improve patient outcomes in the future. Read Less

The purpose of the study is to test the safety and tolerability of twice daily Verdiperstat in patients with semantic variant primary progressive aphasia (svPPA) due to frontotemporal lobar degeneration with TDP-43 pathology (FTLD-TDP). Three-fourths of the participants will receive Verdiperstat and one-fourth will receive Placebo during the 24-week treatment duration. Read Less

PREVENTABLE is a multi-center, randomized, parallel group, placebo-controlled superiority study. Participants will be randomized 1:1 to atorvastatin 40 mg or placebo. This large study conducted in community-dwelling older adults without cardiovascular disease (CVD) or dementia will demonstrate the benefit of statins for reducing the primary composite of death, dementia, and persistent disability and secondary composites including mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and cardiovascular events. Read Less

The goal of the Speech Accessibility Project at the University of Illinois Beckman Institute (https://speechaccessibilityproject.beckman.illinois.edu) is to collect, annotate, and curate a shared database of speech samples from people with atypical speech, and share this data set with researchers at other organizations. This two-year project plans to collect 1,200,000 speech samples from 2,000 people, each of whom will provide 600 samples. In Year 1, the initial focus will be people with Parkinson's. In Year 2, four more etiologies of interest will be recruited: Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), Cerebral Palsy (CP), Down Syndrome (DS), and Stroke. UIUC will build an open-source software infrastructure to collect annotated speech samples and share these data in an appropriately secure fashion with researchers from our partner technology companies (and eventually, other organizations as well) so that they can use these data to improve their automatic speech recognition algorithms. This project promotes diversity, equity, and inclusion by helping technology companies to fully support all types of speech, and it is also more efficient and less burdensome for these specialized patient populations to have one centralized "collector" of speech samples. Read Less