EPAD - European Prevention of Alzheimer's Dementia

European Prevention of Alzheimer's Dementia

- Newsletter July 2020 -

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Welcome

Dear Friends and Colleagues,

What will the world be like once the COVID-19 pandemic is over? We can all speculate, formulate, hypothesise, hope and fear – we will all have our personal crystal balls – some cloudy, some clearer, some ignored and some stared into constantly - but one thing we can all be sure of is that once this nasty little virus is gone and all we have is the scars there will still be millions upon millions of people with or at risk of Alzheimer’s disease.

The whole world is working under the proposal that: ‘Until we get the vaccine we need to do all we can to make sure we don’t get it.’ This could be paraphrased to apply to Alzheimer’s disease too - we have an ongoing and vital role to do all we can to make sure as few people get it (Alzheimer’s disease) as possible through knowledge generation that drives clinical and public health implementation.

Although the IMI period of EPAD has come to an end for many of us in June and the rest of us in October, the aims, objectives and vision of EPAD persists. National programmes are being developed to follow up all the EPAD participants in a series of linked national and local programmes, the database and biobank is in safe hands with substantial funding from the Alzheimer’s Association and the site network is poised to be substantially extended and we will be offered a wide range of trials through the emerging GAP/EPAD collaboration. It is though a huge pity that we couldn’t initiate the platform trial which – after all – was the primary objective of EPAD. Over the weeks and months ahead though we can formally analyse the reasons for this as platform trials are proving to be of massive value in testing new treatments for COVID-19. Perhaps the Alzheimer’s trials world wasn’t quite ready for us – they will be though one day, hopefully soon…

In amongst all these developments and focus on COVID – we released to the world the V1500.0 dataset on schedule and in September we will release the entire EPAD dataset to the partnership and we will work on global release and open access through our collaboration with the Alzheimer’s Disease Data Interoperability Programme which launches formally very soon.

In essence the incredible and valuable contributions we’ve all made since 2014 – including the contribution of our over 2,000 research participants - has created phenomenal momentum and has generated legacies, assets, opportunities and hope for a huge, inspired and inspirational community. The only real challenge is to make sure we each can remain motivated, committed and believing when the (virtual) world manifests such unreality and such distraction.

One thing that is real and certain though is that once this nasty little virus is gone, hundreds of thousands of people will have died from Alzheimer’s disease who shouldn’t have and millions more will still ‘get it’ in the years ahead. If you were asked – ‘what did you do during the COVID Pandemic?’. ‘I kept working to find a cure for Alzheimer’s disease….’ isn’t too shabby an answer.

We will have a virtual General Assembly meeting in September and with our friends in NEURONET, we will meet as early as we can next year face to face to talk about what we’ve done, what we’re doing and what we still need to do. Until then keep safe and keep the faith.

Craig Ritchie

EPAD Co-coordinator

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EPAD V1500.0 is now available to the entire research community

Highlights Q2 2020

EPAD V1500.0 is now available to the entire research community

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 disease at very early stages …

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Lucy Stirland wins 2020 Porto Research Award

Lucy Stirland wins 2020 Porto Research Award

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 in the EFPT. The article …

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EPAD members report on important advances and progress

The Story behind the Picture

EPAD members report on important advances and progress

The past years were very productive and efficient for the EPAD project. In this piece, we wanted to reflect back on some of the important advances and major achievements made by each Work Package (WP). WP1 (Scientific challenges) Creation of 5 Scientific Advisory Groups (SAGs) - Clinical and Cognitive Outcomes, Fluid Biomarkers, Genetics, Imaging and Life Style/Non-Pharmacological Interventions Development of …

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Meet the EPAD team

Interview with Luigi Lorenzini

Interview with Luigi Lorenzini

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 second extract useful information about …

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Interview with John Harrison

Interview with John Harrison

Could you tell us a bit about you? I am an expert psychologist with a special interest in cognition and its measurement. I have recently been appointed Chief Science Officer at Neurotrack and am Principal Consultant at Metis Cognition, a psychology practice established to advise with the selection and successful integration of cognitive testing into therapeutic development programs. I am …

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EPAD presents @

• Alzheimer's Association International Conference (AAIC) is held online from 27 to 31 July. All the presentations are available for 1-month and 2-months for ISTAART members.

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Quarterly Quote

“Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow. The important thing is not to stop questioning."

Albert Einstein -

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