MONDAY, Oct. 18, 2004 (HealthDayNews) --The National Institute on Aging has launched a landmark study aimed at finding a way to use imaging technology to reduce the time and cost of clinical trials for Alzheimer's disease medications.
The Alzheimer's Disease (AD) Neuroimaging Initiative has five major goals:
- To develop a standard imaging method for clinical trials.
- To improve methods of imaging.
- To determine the optimum methods for acquiring and processing images.
- To validate imaging and biomarker data.
- And to provide a database that will be available to all qualified scientific investigators.
Clinical trials of promising new medications tend to be slow, expensive, and difficult to conduct, Dr. Michael Weiner, principal investigator for the study, said this week at the American Medical Association's 23rd Annual Science Reporters Conference.
"Brain imaging seems to offer the greatest potential for tracking the progression of [Alzheimer's] and simplifying clinical trials," Weiner, director of the Center for Imaging of Neurodegenerative Disease at the VA Medical Center in San Francisco, said in a prepared statement.
The study will enroll 800 people at 45 to 50 sites over five years -- 200 normal elderly people and 600 people with varying degrees of Alzheimer's disease or mild cognitive disorder.
Everyone will undergo periodic brain imaging and provide regular blood and urine samples. Clinical evaluations also will be done to allow researchers to correlate biomarkers with neuropsychological and behavioral data.
"Those of us doing brain imaging believe we can recognize how the brain changes in normal aging and identify specific changes that are related to AD," Weiner said. "But every lab is doing something a bit different.
"Some people are using PET (positron emission tomography) and some varying types of MRI (magnetic resonance imaging). What are the best methods? What would make the best standard?"
The initiative is planned as a partnership between the National Institute on Aging, the National Institute on Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, academic investigators, and private partners.
More information
The National Institutes of Health has more about Alzheimer's disease.
