Active clinical trials for "Pick Disease of the Brain"

The goal of this study is to characterize tau kinetics and tau aggregation in the human CNS and to test the hypothesis that tau kinetics are altered (i.e. increased production, decreased clearance, and increased aggregation rate) in tauopathies.

This is an observational study that aims to better understand the genetic causes of frontotemporal degeneration (FTD), Multiple Systems Atrophy (MSA), and Progressive Supranuclear Palsy (PSP). It is hoped the information gathered in this study will help lead to better diagnostics and future treatments.

People diagnosed with young onset dementia are today mostly assigned to the same healthcare services as people developing dementia at an older age. They and their families are however in a quite different life situation, which is likely to generate different challenges and specific needs for tailored healthcare services, of importance in maintaining their perceived quality of life. The investigators of this study wish to assess the factors influencing these families' quality of life, their specific needs and their use of healthcare services by the use a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods. The main aim of this study is to provide better future healthcare services to these families, and to develop a programme for optimal collaboration between specialist healthcare services and the local dementia teams.

The purpose of this study is to assess the performance of AclarusDx™, an investigational blood test detecting gene expression information, and intended to help physicians in making an Alzheimer's Disease diagnosis in patients having memory impairments.

This study aims at exploring patients' ability to monitor their own memory performance depending on their primary deficit and the type of memory involved in the criterion task. The goal is to evaluate if semantic dementia (SD) and Alzheimer's disease (AD) differently affect patients' awareness of their memory abilities.

Frontotemporal Lobar Degeneration (FTLD) is the neuropathological term for a collection of rare neurodegenerative diseases that correspond to four main overlapping clinical syndromes: frontotemporal dementia (FTD), primary progressive aphasia (PPA), corticobasal degeneration syndrome (CBS) and progressive supranuclear palsy syndrome (PSPS). The goal of this study is to build a FTLD clinical research consortium to support the development of FTLD therapies for new clinical trials. The consortium, referred to as Advancing Research and Treatment for Frontotemporal Lobar Degeneration (ARTFL), will be headquartered at UCSF and will partner with six patient advocacy groups to manage the consortium. Participants will be evaluated at 14 clinical sites throughout North America and a genetics core will genotype all individuals for FTLD associated genes.

Primary progressive aphasias (PPA) represent a challenging group of degenerative language diseases that has led to growing interest in the scientific and medical community. However, a full-blown cognitive/linguistic, anatomic and biologic characterization of the three main variants remains incomplete given that the available data derive from relatively small patient samples. Such a three-fold characterisation will be an major milestone with the prospective of providing the rationale for therapeutic interventions comprising specific rehabilitations protocols and pharmacological trials. The present study addresses theses issues in the three PPA main variants through a cross-sectional and longitudinal investigation exploring 1) cognitive/linguistic features, 2) anatomic/metabolic specifications (MRI-VBM, MRI-fiber tracking, functional connectivity - MRI resting state, PET), and 3) biologic aspects (CSF biomarkers, genetic screening).

This study is a US based qualitative PRO research study to document the health insurance literacy as well as the patient experience in Niemann-Pick as it relates to accessing desired care, services and medications for patients. The outcome of this research will be used to inform various other workstreams as NNPDF works to assist families. The core research objectives are to understand the following from Niemann-Pick patients and their families in the US

It is commonly admitted that social cognition impairment, like deficit in facial emotion recognition or misinterpretation of others' intentions (Theory of Mind), are associated with social behavior disorders. This kind of disorders are observed in Fronto-Temporal Dementia (FTD), Alzheimer's Dementia (AD) and Parkinson's Disease (PD), with severe deficits in FTD and lighter deficits in AD and PD. One explanation might be that patients apply inappropriate visual exploration strategies to decode emotions and intentions of others. This study aims to test this hypothesis and further to analyse whether different patterns emerge from these pathologies.

The proposed study is designed to evaluate the performance of the COGNISION™ System as a tool to assist physicians in diagnosing Alzheimer's Disease (AD) in real-world clinical settings. The design of this study is guided by two overriding factors: 1) to optimize the performance of the event related potentials (ERP) classifiers, the subjects making up the training sets must be well characterized as to their clinical diagnosis, and 2) all ERP tests must be performed and reproduced in real-world clinical settings.