Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative announces completion of genome-wid...(role in susceptibility to the disease an...),Health

"This new data set provides a unique opportunity to evaluate the associations between a highly comprehensive dataset based on brain imaging, clinical examinations and other biomarkers and the entire genome or selected candidate genes," said Andrew Saykin, Psy.D., director of the IU Center for Neuroimaging at the Indiana University School of Medicine, who leads the genetics research team.

"Where most prior research focused on the association between genetic variations and the presence or absence of Alzheimer's disease, the new project and data should facilitate novel gene discovery based on associations with neuroimaging patterns detected in the ADNI data," Dr. Saykin said.

For example, "this data set can be analyzed to indentify unanticipated genes associated with hippocampal atrophy, a characteristic of Alzheimer's disease," said Steven Potkin, M.D, director of the Brain Imaging Center of the University of California, Irvine, an investigator involved in the data analysis.

ADNI Principal Investigator Michael Weiner, M.D., director of the Center for the Imaging of Neurodegenerative Diseases at the San Francisco VA Medical Center and professor of radiology, medicine, psychiatry, and neurology at the University of California, San Francisco, said, "The release of this genetics data, in combination with the clinical, cognitive, MRI, PET, and blood/cerebrospinal fluid data already in the ADNI database, will now allow investigators to explore genetic factors related to the rate of progression of Alzheimer's disease. Access to this huge amount of data on a public website, from an ongoing clinical study, is unprecedented."

All data from the ADNI consortium are available to qualified investigators through a web-based database (www.loni.ucla.e
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