Active clinical trials for "Pick Disease of the Brain"

The main source of energy for the brain comes from a combination of oxygen and glucose (sugar). For brain cells to function normally they must receive a constant supply of these nutrients. As areas of the brain become more active blood flow into and out of these areas increase. In addition to oxygen and glucose, the brain uses chemical compounds known as phospholipids. These phospholipids make up the covering of nerve cells that assist in the transfer of information from cell to cell. Without phospholipids brain cell activity may become abnormal and cause problems in the nervous system. Certain diseases like Alzheimer's disease and brain tumors can affect blood flow to the brain and change the way the brain metabolizes phospholipids. In addition to diseases, changes in the brain occur with normal healthy aging. This study is designed to use PET scan to measure changes in blood flow and changes in phospholipid metabolism. Using this technique, researchers can improve their understanding of how certain diseases change the shape and function of the brain.

The purpose of this research is to better understand how dementia affects activity in different parts of the brain.

The primary objective of the study is to evaluate the feasibility of eliciting continuous narrative speech in different neurodegenerative and psychiatric indications, using remote, self-administered speech tasks, as measured by the average length of speech elicitation for each speech task during the first week of self-assessment. Secondary objectives include (1) evaluating the reliability of speech tasks in the remote self-administered setting, as measured by the intra- and inter-subject variance; (2) accessing the adherence of speech tasks in this setting, as measured by the subject average fraction of days during the first week, where at least one task response is submitted; (3) evaluating the feasibility of using speech tasks in the setting of a telemedicine videoconference, as measured by the average length of speech elicited in each group; (4) evaluate whether a set of acoustic and linguistic patterns can detect each indication, compare to either a control group or all other indications, as measured by the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC), sensitivity, specificity and Cohen's kappa of the relevant binary classifier; (5) evaluating how the performance of such algorithms can be impacted by speaker and environment covariates, as measured by the Kendall rank correlation coefficient of the AUC of each classifier and each of age group, gender and speech-to-reverberation modulation energy ratio.

Behavioural disorders are very common right from the initial stage of dementia and contribute to loss of autonomy. Behavioural dysexecutive disorders have a particular status due to their prevalence and their diagnostic importance, as they often constitute the initial symptoms of Frontotemporal Dementia (FTD), Semantic Dementia (SD) and Huntington's disease (HD) and they are classically more frequent in vascular dementia (VaD) than in Alzheimer's disease (AD). The presence of these disorders at the stage of Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) has only been partially evaluated and would increase the risk of progression to dementia. These classical data are based on non-standardized assessments and non-validated diagnostic criteria. The Groupe de Reflexion pour l'Evaluation des Fonctions EXécutives (GREFEX) has developed a standardized assessment tool for behavioural dysexecutive disorders, the Behavioural Dysexecutive Syndrome Inventory (BDSI) and has validated diagnostic criteria for this syndrome.

The goal of this study is to examine olfactory function in preclinical subjects or individuals with neurological diseases such as Probable Alzheimer's Disease (PRAD), Frontotemporal Dementias (FTD), Dementia with Lewy Bodies (DLB), Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI), and Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS).

This is an open-label, single subject, expanded access protocol (EAP) of the LAM-002A investigational product administered orally at 125 mg BID for 52 weeks.

The Virtual Physiological Human: DementiA Research Enabled by IT (VPH-DARE@IT) is a four-year IT-project funded through the European Union (EU). The project consortium involves a total of 21 universities and industrial partners from 10 European countries. The project delivers the first patient-specific predictive models for early differential diagnosis of dementia and their evolution. An integrated clinical decision support platform will be validated / tested by access to a dozen databases of international cross-sectional and longitudinal studies. As a part of the VPH-DARE@IT project, a new prospective cohort will be collected in Kuopio. This prospective cohort will be used to test further the modeling approaches and tools developed by using the retrospective databases.

The purpose of this observational study is to improve understanding of the biology of why ALS, MS and FTD have different effects on different people and facilitate better measurement of the disease in future drug testing. To do this, brain and spinal cord neural network functionality will be measured over time, in addition to profiling of movement and non-movement symptoms, in large groups of patients, as well as in a population-based sample of the healthy population. Patterns of dysfunction which relate to patients' diagnosis and coinciding and future symptoms which align with categories of patients with similar prognoses will be investigated and their ability to predict incident patients' symptoms in future will be measured.

Tau pathology and tangles have been associated with cognitive dysfunction causing neurodegeneration. AD, the most abundant tauopathy is characterized by amyloid plaques and tau tangles. An abundance of tau inclusions, in the absence of amyloid deposits, defines Pick's disease (frontotemporal lobar degeneration), progressive supranuclear palsy (PSP), corticobasal degeneration (CBD) and other diseases including frontal atrophy associated with cognitive clinical dysfunction of frontal dysexecutive syndrome, progressive nonfluent aphasia and semantic dementia as recently reviewed (Gozes 2010). It is the investigators aim to follow other protein expression [as per recent publications (Marksteiner et al., 2011)] in blood and CSF samples from those tauopathies. Significance: Results should establish the possibility of using tau and other proteins as markers for early detection and disease progression in FTD, also in comparison to Alzheimer's disease (AD).

The purpose of this study is to use a functional MRI (fMRI) index to compare the brain activity of healthy volunteers to that of people with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and Alzheimer's disease. The ultimate goal is to develop an early diagnostic tool for Alzheimer's disease. The study hypotheses are: The fMRI index will differentiate between Alzheimer's disease, non-Alzheimer's dementia, and healthy volunteers; The fMRI index will distinguish participants with MCI who convert to Alzheimer's disease from those who convert to a non-Alzheimer's dementia and those who remain stable; MCI participants with a lower fMRI index at baseline who convert will progress to Alzheimer's sooner than those with a higher fMRI index, and MCI participants with a faster rate of fMRI index decline who convert will have an earlier onset of Alzheimer's disease.