Alzheimer's study gets $6.6 million grant

Researchers at Banner Alzheimer's Institute and Mayo Clinic have won a $6.6 million federal grant to continue and expand their research into the earliest indicators of Alzheimer's disease.

The five-year funding from the National Institute on Aging supports a study using PET and MRI brain scans to measure brain changes in healthy people, some who carry a gene linked to the disease and others who don't.

"We truly believe that this work will play a pivotal role in finding effective treatments to end Alzheimer's disease without losing a generation," said Dr. Eric Reiman, executive director of the Banner Alzheimer's Institute and the study's principal investigator.

Reiman and Dr. Richard Caselli, co-principal investigator and chairman of the neurology department at Mayo Clinic, launched the study about 15 years ago with funding from the National Institutes of Health. Their results, published in the New England Journal of Medicine and other journals, show the ability to track declines in brain activity and brain size in people with the Alzheimer's susceptibility gene even before memory and thinking problems begin.

Ongoing work will track early development of amyloid plaques, protein deposits that are a hallmark of the disease.

Researchers from Arizona State University, University of Arizona and the Translational Genomics Research Institute are also involved.