Natural history of Mild Cognitive Impairment and Alzheimer’s Disease: factors influencing early detection, clinical course, and prognosis

Objective

Background: There has been great interest in identifying persons at high risk of developing Alzheimer disease (AD) and dementia, as they should constitute a target group for possible prevention or early treatment of dementia in the future. Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) is a transitional zone between normal cognitive function and clinical AD. The MCI syndrome is characterized by subjective memory problems and memory deficits. Persons with MCI have an increased risk of developing dementia but some are stable or even recover, while others have an increased risk of death. As not all subjects with MCI progress to dementia, there is a need to examine factors that determine which MCI subjects will develop dementia. Aims/implementation: The main aims include to: 1) identify predictors of AD in the early, prediagnostic phase of the disease; 2) evaluate prognostic factors in patients with MCI; 3) explore the natural history of AD and other dementias and; 4) assess the occurrence of behavioral and psychological symptoms in dementia. The two-year Fellowship will be conducted at the Santa Lucia Foundation, Rome, and the Italian National Research Council, Institute of Biomedical Technologies, Milan. Three Italian, multi-center, clinical cohort studies on patients with AD and MCI will be investigated: 1) Behavioral and Psychological Symptoms of Dementia (BPSD) multi-center Italian study, including 1015 patients with AD; 2) The Italian Dementia Study, a multi-center clinical study of 1550 patients with MCI, AD and other dementias and; 3) The Italian Network on AD, MCI study, including 270 subjects with MCI, who were referred to 21 neurological centers around Italy in 2000-1. Relevance: The current project might have considerable implications n public health and understanding the natural history of degenerative diseases. Detecting syndromes associated with an early AD phase will enable earlier treatment, healthcare planning, and the postponement of institutionalization.

Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)

CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eu-vocabularies/euroscivoc.

• medical and health sciences health sciences public health
• natural sciences biological sciences neurobiology cognitive neuroscience
• medical and health sciences basic medicine neurology dementia alzheimer
• humanities history and archaeology history

Keywords

Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)

• Alzheimer's disease
• aging
• dementia
• epidemiology
• mild cognitive impairment
• neurodegeneration
• neurology
• neuropsychology

Programme(s)

Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.

• FP7-PEOPLE - Specific programme "People" implementing the Seventh Framework Programme of the European Community for research, technological development and demonstration activities (2007 to 2013)

Topic(s)

Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.

• PEOPLE-2007-2-1.IEF - Marie Curie Action: "Intra-European Fellowships for Career Development"

Call for proposal

Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.

FP7-PEOPLE-2007-2-1-IEF
See other projects for this call

Funding Scheme

Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.

MC-IEF - Intra-European Fellowships (IEF)

Coordinator