The members of the EPAD initiative are glad to announce that its Longitudinal Cohort Study has recruited its 1,000th participant at the University of Oxford (UK) this 21st September on World Alzheimer’s Day.
EPAD is one of the world leading dementia prevention studies, led from the University of Edinburgh. It is a Europe-wide collaboration aiming to improve the understanding of the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease. It combines knowledge and expertise from 38 European organisations from academia and industry, bringing together a wealth of experience to its activities and making it the largest ever public-private partnership in Alzheimer’s disease research. The EPAD project offers a unique platform for testing and developing preventative treatments for Alzheimer’s dementia.
This new approach of tackling the global concern of dementia has reached a milestone where the EPAD Cohort has screened more than 1,000 research participants.
“We want to stand with the young academics and researchers helping to find a cure or amelioration for dementia”, said a research participant in the EPAD study.
EPAD is set up to recruit from existing cohort studies as well as clinics across Europe. EPAD has established the first pan-European register including more than 30,000 research participants aged 50 or over across the dementia risk spectrum. From this register, individuals who do not have dementia are invited to join the EPAD Cohort study, involving regular health checks, standardised tests and brain scans. All participants are followed up over several years.
Many participants in the EPAD Cohort study may be invited to participate in the EPAD Proof of Concept Trial to test new treatments for the prevention of Alzheimer’s dementia.
“Recruiting from the EPAD Cohort allows us to select the right people for the drug studies who are most likely to benefit from them. We are very grateful to have reached 1,000 participants in this globally important project”, said Professor Craig Ritchie, EPAD Co-coordinator.
Participants in the EPAD Cohort are contributing to the advancement of science around dementia prevention in 20 locations across 7 European countries (i.e. France, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland, Sweden and UK) and more sites to join soon.