CORE--RELIGIOUS ORDERS STUDY

Rush University Medical Center, Chicago IL

Investigators

Linked publications & trials

Abstract

The overall goal of the Religious Orders Study Core is to continue to facilitate externally funded high quality research on MCI, AD, and related disorders. The Core supports a variety of studies by investigators at Rush and across the county, including studies of the transition from normality to MCI to AD;studies linking postmortem findings to the spectrum of cognition from normality, to MCI, to AD;and studies that link genetic and environmental risk factors to post-mortem indices and clinical data obtained proximate to death. The Core will build on its success during the past funding period and continue recruiting and performing annual evaluations on older members of Catholic Religious Communities without dementia with an emphasis on enrolling African American and Hispanic Catholic clergy. More than 1000 participants have enrolled. The overall follow-up rate exceeds 98% with up to 12 waves of data, and the autopsy rate exceeds 90% with more than 300 autopsies. The Core supports numerous externally funded projects. After a relatively modest production of original report, peer reviewed manuscripts in the first years of the study (nine papers between 1997 and 2001), a total of 76 original report, peer-reviewed papers were published between 2002 to present, and 15 more papers are currently under review. The manuscripts have been published by a wide variety of authors from Rush, several other NIA-funded AD Centers, and other centers in the United States, Canada, and Europe. The continuation of this Core for five more years will result in up to 17 waves of data on more than 1000 persons and brain tissue from about 500 persons. Such a rich and diverse resource will allow the Core to continue to support numerous investigators. It will also offer the AD research community new opportunities to use clinical pathologic studies in novel ways to understand the complex relation between post-mortem indices and the progressive cognitive decline from normality, to MCI, to AD, and to link genetic and environmental risk factors obtained prior to dementia onset to post-mortem indices and the full spectrum of cognition documented proximate to death.