Mount Sinai Medical Center in Miami Beach and The University of Florida have received funding from the National Institutes of Health to establish an Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center.
“The state of Florida is one of the epicenters of the Alzheimer’s epidemic, with something like 500,000 people diagnosed with the disease,” said Todd Golde, M.D., the director of the UF Center for Translational Research in Neurodegenerative Disease. “From a demographic point of view, we really need an Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center.”
The Alzheimer’s Disease Research Centers are a network of organizations across the United States funded by the National Institute on Aging and the National Institutes of Health. Investigators at the centers aim to turn research into better diagnosis and care for people with Alzheimer’s. While Mayo Clinic has an Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center satellite center in Jacksonville, Florida, the UF/Mount Sinai newly funded center will be the only fully staffed center located in Florida, and one of only 30 in the United States.
The center will support a total of five cores, including administration, clinical, neuropathology, data management and statistics, and outreach, recruitment and education cores.
Dr. Golde is the director of the center and Ranjan Duara, M.D., currently the medical director of the Wien Center for Alzheimer’s Disease and Memory Disorders at Mount Sinai Medical Center, is the associate director of the center. Dr. Duara, director of the clinical core based at Mount Sinai, says that a major focus of the new center will be to study Hispanic patients with Alzheimer’s disease and compare them to non-Hispanics with the disease.
“In Florida we have a very diverse population who have different lifestyles, speak different languages, have varying cultures, levels of education, and levels of stress,” said Dr. Duara. “Whereas, this variability poses challenges in determining the correct diagnosis and predicting the rate of progression, it also provides an opportunity for a better understanding of how these factors influence the risk for developing Alzheimer’s disease and its rate of progression.”
The center will also focus on diagnosing Alzheimer’s disease and dementia at an earlier stage, and providing those patients with state-of-the-art care. David Loewenstein, Ph.D., a professor at the University of Miami’s Miller School of Medicine, director of the Psychological Services and Neuropsychology Laboratory at Mount Sinai Medical Center, and a co-director of the clinical core, will develop a study to assess the earliest manifestations of Alzheimer’s disease.
“The push is to ask ourselves, ‘Can we detect Alzheimer’s disease earlier and earlier in the population?’” Dr. Golde said. “What we’d like to do is prevent people from even getting dementia rather than trying to cure brain organ failure.”
The rest of the cores, which are based at UF, will work together with the clinical core at Mount Sinai to provide educational resources and support for the recruitment of patients. The data management core will help corral information generated by studies in the clinical and neuropathology cores, helping to manage all the data and perform the necessary analyses, so as to study the information gleaned and compile a database of patients with Alzheimer’s disease across Florida. Drs. Golde and Duara will also oversee the administrative core, which will develop a pilot grant program to provide funding for junior researchers with an interest in studying Alzheimer’s disease, for two to three small research projects per year.
Researchers with Florida International and Florida Atlantic universities are also involved with the center.
