Scientists at Penn State, Albert Einstein College of Medicine, the University of Southern California and other institutions have formed a new research network to detect the earliest signs of dementia years before symptoms emerge. The Open Measures Network Initiative for Alzheimer’s Disease and Related Dementia Research and Prevention (OMNI ADRD), made possible by a five-year, $39 million grant from the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) National Institute on Aging, aims to reduce the financial, interpersonal and health impacts of Alzheimer’s disease and related dementia.
The worldwide annual cost of Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias is estimated to reach $2 trillion dollars a year by 2030 and continue rising after that. People with Alzheimer’s disease often experience memory loss, impaired judgement, personality changes, anxiety and — eventually — complete dependence on others. These changes pose deep costs that go beyond finances not only for individuals but also for their families and loved ones.
“The financial burden of Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias largely falls on taxpayers through Medicare, Medicaid and lost workforce productivity,” said Martin Sliwinski, professor of human development and family studies and Gregory H. Wolf Professor of Healthy Aging at Penn State. Sliwinski is the contact principal investigator on the project and will serve as co-director of OMNI ADRD. “Our research network aims to provide the foundation for more effective prevention efforts. It will help reduce future public health costs and increase the impact of federally funded research. The ultimate goal, of course, is to prevent dementia-related suffering for millions of people throughout the United States.”
Detecting and preventing Alzheimer’s disease
Currently, assessments for Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias in the U.S. vary between health networks or are governed by licenses that restrict modification or wide-spread use, according to Sliwinski, director of the Penn State Center for Healthy Aging. These assessments may include cognitive assessments, brain imaging, biomarkers, wearable sensors and more.
To address current assessment limitations, researchers in OMNI ADRD plan to develop and disseminate a new generation of precise, open-access cognitive and behavioral assessment tools that can be broadly used among people and will provide uniform data so that treatments, risk factors and other factors relevant to dementias can be tracked and evaluated on a large scale. The researchers will focus on tools for people during midlife so that Alzheimer’s and related dementias can be identified — and someday prevented — before problems arise.
The research network will compile a comprehensive inventory of existing assessment resources for Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias. The researchers aim to modernize and coordinate brain health measurements across the research community, with the goal of bringing tools out of the lab and into real-world settings, including clinics, community programs and — through mobile-health platforms on smartphones — people’s homes.
The network includes investigators from research institutions across the U.S. and will create an open-access digital platform to host pre-existing, refined and newly developed scientifically vetted cognitive and behavioral assessments, complete with documentation, scoring systems and integration tools for use by researchers and clinicians. The network will also harmonize existing NIH-funded data to accelerate discovery, coordinate strategic pilot studies to fill high-priority gaps in measurement science and ensure that tools are usable across a wide range of populations and care settings.
Network leadership and Penn State’s contributions
OMNI ADRD will be co-led by Sliwinski and Laura Germine, chief of the Division of Brain and Cognitive Health Technology in the Department of Neurology at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Sy-Miin Chow, professor of human development and family studies and Social Science Research Institute co-funded faculty member at Penn State, and Duke Han, professor of psychology, family medicine, neurology and gerontology at the University of Southern California.
Penn State’s contributions to OMNI ADRD will span cognitive science, neuropsychology, translational medicine and digital infrastructure. Jonathan Hakunassociate professor of neurology, of psychology and of public health sciences, and Timothy Brearly, neuropsychologist with Penn State Health and associate professor of neurology, neuroscience, and experimental therapeutics, will provide expertise in cognitive assessment and brain health measurement. Jennifer Kraschnewski, professor of medicine and principal investigator of Penn State’s Clinical and Translational Science Institute, will contribute expertise in translational science and implementation across health care systems. Scott Yabiku, professor of sociology and demography, serves as lead designer of the Mobile Monitoring of Cognitive Change (M2C2) platform, the software system being developed to facilitate the digital cognitive assessments that are central to OMNI ADRD. Nelson Roque, assistant professor of human development and family studies, will serve as the lead data- infrastructure architect for M2C2. David Almeida, professor of human development and family studies, will apply his expertise in daily stress and social relationship measurement to develop approaches that integrate real-world contextual influences into the network’s digital cognitive assessments. Zita Oravecz, professor of human development and family studies, and Michael Hunter, assistant professor of human development and family studies, will develop advanced analytic tools for the digital cognitive assessments.
“This research network will advance rigorous, reproducible science and improve research efficiency through harmonized data and shared tools — all of which are key NIH priorities and in alignment with Penn State’s values,” Sliwinski said. “Our research will focus on early detection, real-world implementation and open-access infrastructure supports to develop more effective prevention strategies for Alzheimer’s and other chronic brain conditions.”
Foundational work leading to this grant was jointly supported by Huck Institutes of Life Sciences at Penn State and the Penn State Social Science Research Institute through the Geroscience and Dementia Prevention Consortium.