Alzheimer's Disease Paid Clinical Trials in Tennessee

This study seeks to improve clinical outcomes for an important, growing, and vulnerable population-nursing home residents with Alzheimer's disease or related dementias-by testing an evidence-based intervention to improve these residents' sleep. It will also examine the implementation and sustainment of this intervention. Read Less

The Syn-D Study will be evaluating α-synuclein in patients with suspected MCI-AD and MCI-DLB. Using a simple diagnostic test will improve clinical accuracy in diagnosing, earlier diagnosis, and distinguish between neurodegenerative diseases. Read Less

The purpose of the Trial-Ready Cohort - Down Syndrome (TRC-DS) is to enroll 120 healthy adults with Down syndrome (DS), between the ages of 25-55, into a trial ready cohort (TRC), and up to 250 participants in total including co-enrolled in the Alzheimer Biomarkers Consortium - Down Syndrome (ABC-DS) study. Participants enrolled in the TRC-DS will undergo longitudinal cognitive and clinical assessment, genetic and biomarker testing, as well as imaging and biospecimen collection. Using these outcome measures, researchers will analyze the relationships between cognitive measures and biomarkers of Alzheimer's disease (AD) to identify endpoints for AD clinical trials in DS that best reflect disease progression. To learn more about the study and participating sites, visit our study website at: https://www.trcds.org/. TRC-DS is collaborating with the Alzheimer's Disease Biomarker Consortium-Down Syndrome (ABC-DS) to allow study participants to be concurrently enrolled in both ABC-DS and TRC-DS, referred to as "co-enrollment". ABC-DS is a longitudinal, observational research study that is overseen at University of Pittsburgh Coordinating Center. ABC-DS participants who express interest in potentially joining a clinical trial in the future and who meet TRC-DS eligibility criteria, may choose to co-enroll in TRC-DS at an ABC-DS Site. Co-enrolled participants will adhere to the ABC-DS protocol and schedule of activities, but agree to share their data with the TRC-DS team and to receive invitations for future participation in clinical trials. Fore more information on ABC-DS please visit https://www.nia.nih.gov/research/abc-ds or http://abcds.pitt.edu/. Read Less

The objective of this study is to demonstrate the impact of a socially assistive robot system on reducing apathy among cognitively impaired older adults residing in long term care facilities. Earlier phases of this project demonstrated the feasibility and acceptability of the robotic system. First, investigators will improve the social robotic interaction architecture through additional software development, enhance its versatility, and make it easy for non-experts to run. Second, 188 participants will be randomized to either usual activity programs at the long term care facility, or the usual activity programs plus the robotic activities. Researchers will examine the effect on apathy and also plan on examining underlying individual and facility factors that influence the impact of the robotic activities. Read Less

The primary purpose of this study is to determine whether treatment with lecanemab is superior to placebo on change from baseline of the Preclinical Alzheimer Cognitive Composite 5 (PACC5) at 216 weeks of treatment (A45 Trial) and to determine whether treatment with lecanemab is superior to placebo in reducing brain amyloid accumulation as measured by amyloid positron emission tomography (PET) at 216 weeks of treatment (A3 Trial). This study will also evaluate the long-term safety and tolerability of lecanemab in participants enrolled in the Extension Phase. Read Less

Progressive age-related cognitive deficits occurring in both AD and DS have been connected to the degeneration of several neuronal populations, but mechanisms are not fully elucidated. The most consistent neuronal losses throughout the progression of AD are seen in cholinergic neurons where these losses negatively affect cognition, particularly in attention, learning, and memory formation. Evidence of reduced cholinergic integrity in DS is largely limited to animal models and post-mortem human data. The investigators propose to use molecular, functional, and structural biomarkers to assess the cholinergic integrity in adults with DS. The investigators anticipate using the data gathered in this pilot study to inform future study designs to determine AD risk stratification in DS by identifying individuals who show an accelerated decline in cholinergic integrity that correlates with cognitive and neurobehavioral changes. Also, our cholinergic biomarkers may identify whether individuals with DS are likely to respond to pro-cholinergic interventions, including the novel cholinergic modulators that are being developed to enhance cholinergic-sensitive cognitive functioning. The investigators anticipate using the data gathered here to inform future treatment studies in TRC-DS and beyond where novel cholinergic treatments may offer opportunities for early intervention in DS and be complementary to disease-modifying approaches such as anti-amyloid treatments. Read Less

The purpose of the study is to investigate the efficacy of cortical gamma oscillation on visual sensory processing and cognitive function in Alzheimer's Disease (AD) patients by combining a therapeutic sensory stimulation device capable of evoking 40-Hz gamma oscillation via non-invasive visual and auditory stimulation with pre-established markers of cortical network activity, i.e., electroencephalography (EEG) and event-related potentials (ERP), to evaluate the applicability of the 40-Hz multimodel sensory stimulation as a novel therapeutic approach for treatment of AD patients. Read Less

The study will determine if Therapeutic Plasma Exchange removes RNA biomarkers associated with Alzheimer's Disease and how quickly those biomarkers reappear after treatment. Read Less

The primary objective of the Vanderbilt Alzheimer's Disease Research Center (VADRC) is to provide local and national researchers with access to a well-characterized and diverse clinical cohort, including participant referrals, biosamples, clinical data, and neuroimaging data. The VADRC Clinical Core will create an infrastructure to support research efforts of both local and national investigator studies to develop early detection, prevention, and treatment strategies for Alzheimer's disease. The Clinical Core intends to enroll up to 1000 participants, including individuals who are cognitively unimpaired, have mild cognitive impairment, or have Alzheimer's disease. This cohort of about 1000 participants will be called the Tennessee Alzheimer's Project. Participants will be seen annually for comprehensive clinical characterization and then referred to other studies to enhance Alzheimer's disease research activities. Read Less

This study will use an observational cohort to cross-sectionally and longitudinally relate vascular health to clinical, imaging, and biological markers of early Alzheimer's disease and cerebrovascular disease among aging adults. Adjusting for relevant clinical covariates, we will test the hypothesis that vascular health is associated with clinical, brain magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), neuropsychological, and cerebrospinal fluid markers of early cerebrovascular and Alzheimer's disease changes (i.e., prior to the onset of significant cognitive decline or dementia). Secondarily, we will examine medical and genetic factors that might mediate associations between vascular health and brain aging, such as inflammatory processes, insulin resistance, and genetic factors (e.g., APOE, a susceptibility risk factor for dementia). Findings will advance knowledge regarding the role that vascular health plays in brain aging. Read Less

Women are at increased risk for Alzheimer's disease (AD). Notably at menopause, some women experience a change in cognition. However, not all women experience negative effects of menopause on cognition. The cognitive changes that occur at menopause have not yet been connected to late life risk for pathological aging including AD. Thus, understanding the neurobiological factors related to individual differences in cognition at menopause is critical for understanding normal cognitive aging and for determining risk for pathological aging. The challenge in understanding the role of estrogen loss on the risk for AD is the long lag time between the hormonal changes at menopause and the clinical manifestations of AD. Thus, identifying how the hormone changes after menopause are related to AD risk will alter the risk calculus for postmenopausal women in the future. The novel study proposed here will examine an established AD-related neurotransmitter-based mechanism that may also underlie cognitive changes after menopause. The investigators propose that the change in the hormonal milieu at menopause interacts with the cholinergic system and other brain pathologies to influence a woman's risk for cognitive decline. Preclinical studies have shown that estrogen is necessary for normal cholinergic functioning and its withdrawal leads to cholinergic dysfunction and cognitive impairment. It is important to determine whether menopause-related cognitive changes correlate with both cholinergic functional integrity and established AD biomarkers that portend increased risk for late-life cognitive impairment or dementia. This study will examine brain functioning following cholinergic blockade to separate individuals into those who are able to compensate for the hormone change after menopause and those who are not. The investigators hypothesize women with poor compensation have increased sensitivity to cholinergic blockade by showing poor performance on a cognitive task, altered brain activation, and decreased basal forebrain cholinergic system (BFCS) volume. These cholinergic markers will be related to menopausal factors associated with poor cognition and biomarkers of AD. Specific Aim 1 is to examine cholinergic functional "integrity" by measuring working memory performance, functional brain activation, and BFCS structure in postmenopausal women. Specific Aim 2 will examine whether individual differences in menopause-relevant symptoms and known AD biomarkers are related to cognition and brain activation after anticholinergic challenge. The public health significance of this study is that it will identify individual difference factors that are associated with cognitive performance changes after menopause and their relationship to structural, functional, and biomarker evidence of risk for later life cognitive dysfunction. Knowledge of these factors will serve to advance personalized future risk-mitigation strategies for women including hormonal, medication, cognitive remediation, etc. that will be the subject of further research. Read Less

The purpose of this project is to investigate the role of both neural inflammation and pre-existing neurodegenerative pathology in the risk and pathogenesis of post-operative cognitive dysfunction (POCD). To achieve this goal, the investigators will combine blood and cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) sampling, standardized cognitive tests, and dynamic neurophysiological markers of cortical network dysfunction in the form of event-related potentials (ERPs), to assess the link between neurodegeneration and neuroinflammation in the pathogenesis of POCD. Read Less