The SPEAR (Study of Participant Experience of Alzheimer’s disease Research) study was carried out as part of EPAD’s Work Package on the Ethical, Legal and Social Implications of the project (ELSI). In the early stages of EPAD, the ELSI team pointed to the extent and intensity of tests and measurements deemed necessary to provide a…
Lucy Stirland has been awarded the 2020 Porto Research Award from the European Federation of Psychiatric Trainees (EFPT) for her paper using EPAD V500.0 data, published last year in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease. The aims of this award are to encourage psychiatric trainees to conduct research and contribute to the engagement of psychiatry trainees…
Could you tell us a bit about you and your work? After studying Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuropsychology in Rome I started my PhD in Amsterdam as part of the EPAD project. My work within EPAD consists in analysing neuroimaging outcomes to first create a shared and publicly available dataset for internal and external researchers and…
The European Prevention of Alzheimer’s Dementia (EPAD) project is very pleased to announce the external release of its second wave of data including the baseline data from the first 1.500 research participants (V1500.0). “This most recent and substantial data release from the EPAD cohort will undoubtedly have a major impact on our understanding of Alzheimer’s…
Tell us a bit about the institution/company/organisations you work for. For the last twelve years, I’ve been working at Aridhia (https://aridhia.com), an SME based in Edinburgh and Glasgow specialising in informatics for biomedical research. After working for some years with specialist clinicians in hospitals and clinics with specialised medical data, we found our current focus…
The worldwide COVID-19 pandemic has inevitably impacted EPAD and its consortium members. The EPAD project management team is monitoring the situation closely. Most EPAD research and clinical trial activities had to stop as of early March as progressively universities across Europe closed, and the clinical sites were either closed or saw site staff redeployed to…
What is your current role in EPAD? My current role in EPAD is the PI of the EPAD Bioresource. This is the sample collection that has been taken from EPAD participants from across Europe and is held at the University of Edinburgh. The Bioresource is responsible for the safe storage of these samples and for…
The EPAD consortium wishes to congratulate Lisa Vermunt and Lucy Stirland, two EPAD fellows, on successfully defending their PhD thesis in March 2020. It was two great days and we are proud of their contributions and all the hard work that Lisa and Lucy have put in – very well deserved! We wish them both…
A message from the EPAD Coordinators to all involved in the EPAD Longitudinal Cohort Study By now you will all be aware of the unexpected closure of the EPAD Longitudinal Cohort Study. We are writing to you to explain the background to this and also to thank you for your commitment to this research and the…
The EPAD team published a new paper entitled “Cognitive Functions as Predictors of Alzheimer’s Disease Biomarker Status in the European Prevention of Alzheimer’s Dementia Cohort” in the journal of Alzheimer’s disease. Abstract: Alterations in Alzheimer’s disease (AD) biomarkers have been observed decades before the onset of dementia. Cognitive dysfunction, while central to the clinical diagnosis…
