The University of California has received a multi-year grant of nearly $14.7 million from the National Institutes of Health to study contributing factors to dementia in the Latino population in the United States. The multicenter study will examine the biological bases of stroke, mild cognitive impairment, and Alzheimer’s disease among Hispanics, and will seek new therapeutic directions to reduce disparities in brain health.
“This is the largest study of Latinos with cognitive impairment ever conducted,” said co-principal investigator Charles S. DeCarli (photo), director of the UC Davis Alzheimer’s Disease Center. “Latinos are the fastest-growing minority in our aging population, so cognitive impairment in this group is an important public health concern.”
UC Davis and nine other institutions across the country will participate in the research. Investigators will utilize the cohort of more than 16,000 patients from the ongoing Hispanic Community Health Study/Study of Latinos (HCHS/SOL), a multicenter epidemiological study primarily focused on cardiovascular and pulmonary diseases. A complementary study, the Study of Latinos-Investigation of Neurocognitive Aging (SOL-INCA), is examining genetic and cardiovascular disease risk factors for neurocognitive deficits and will also provide important data for this research.
DeCarli, a professor of neurology at UC Davis Health, noted that the Latino population is especially important to study in the field of dementia because it has a higher prevalence of diabetes, hypertension, and obesity compared to non-Hispanic Caucasians, all risk factors for stroke and dementia. Alzheimer’s disease rates are about 1.5 times higher than in non-Hispanic whites.
The study will employ cutting-edge magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) techniques, which can help assess brain vascular lesions and atrophy patterns observed in Alzheimer’s disease. MRIs will be obtained at partner institutions and evaluated at UC Davis.
“Advanced neuroimaging techniques can help us better understand the relationship between brain structure and function with aging and disease,” said DeCarli, who leads the UC Davis Imaging of Dementia and Aging (IDeA) lab. “The information obtained will help us better design and monitor new therapies.”
Study investigators will also explore the role of genetics in Alzheimer’s disease. The E4 variant of the apolipoprotein gene has been strongly implicated in increasing the risk of early-onset Alzheimer’s disease in non-Hispanic Caucasians, but paradoxically, some Hispanic ethnic groups have a very low frequency of this allele despite high rates of dementia.
“What else is going on beyond genetics?” DeCarli pondered. “This grant will help us advance this and many other interesting lines of research in this very ethnically and genetically diverse population.”