Alzheimer's Disease Clinical Trials in Philadelphia, PA

New IDEAS is an observational, open-label, longitudinal cohort study designed to address the requirements of the CED provisions of the NCD on beta-amyloid PET. Building on the initial Imaging Dementia-Evidence for Amyloid Scanning (IDEAS) study, New IDEAS will evaluate the association between amyloid PET and patient-centered outcomes in an expanded and more ethnoracially and clinically diverse group of Medicare participants presenting with cognitive impairment. Read Less

There are very few effective interventions that promote functional independence in people with Alzheimer's disease (AD) and related dementias. This R21 project is the first step in the long-term goal of developing an effective, enjoyable, portable, and inexpensive non-immersive virtual reality (VR) training intervention for improving the performance of everyday tasks. The investigators' VR training approach is built upon the results of past studies that show 1) when people with AD repeatedly practice daily tasks they subsequently perform them more completely and without error; and 2) healthy people are able to transfer skills learned in VR-contexts to tasks in the real world. This R21 study will obtain preliminary data to inform a future randomized clinical trial through three aims: Aim 1) To test the hypothesis that individuals with mild-moderate AD will show improved performance on an everyday task after repeatedly practicing the task in a non-immersive VR setting; Aim 2) To explore usability and acceptability of the VR training as well as associations between individual differences variables (e.g., cognitive abilities, demographics) and training effects. To test Aim 1, 40 participants with mild to moderate AD will be recruited to complete daily VR Training sessions for one week. VR Training will include repeated practice of a single, everyday task in a non-immersive VR-context (VR Breakfast or VR Lunch; counterbalanced across participants). The primary outcome measure is performance of the real-life version of the trained task, which will be collected before and at two time points after training, compared to performance of an untrained, control task of comparable difficulty, and scored from video by coders blinded to training task/condition. To evaluate Aim 2, all participants and an informant will complete interviews and questionnaires and participants will complete tests of cognitive abilities. Usability and acceptability of the VR training will be evaluated and associations between participant variables and VR Training results will be explored. If the proposed hypothesis is supported and results show that training effects generalize from virtual to real tasks in the study sample, then VR training of custom and individualized tasks will be investigated in a future randomized, controlled clinical trial for maintaining and improving functional abilities in people with mild to moderate AD. Read Less