CORE--PHARMACOLOGY

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ADRC Subcore in Clinical Pharmacology. The clinical neuropharmacology subcore for the Alzheimer's Disease Research Center Consortium of Los Angeles and Orange Counties (ADRC) maintains an infrastructure to support, strengthen, and facilitate clinical pharmacological research in the ADRC. The core improves the quality of clinical research and hypothesis testing; increases the kinds of clinical studies performed; and increases and expedites patient access to studies at the ADRC. The resources of the core are utilized by and benefit individual ongoing projects and investigators and foster new meritorious clinical research projects. The core is based at the Tower Hall Clinical on the USC School of Medicine campus, and consists of a program director, Dr. Schneider, geriatric physicians, a bilingual clinical psychologist, a research nurse/coordinator, and administrative assistant, and research assistants. Specific goals include the performance of pilot or preliminary clinical pharmacological investigations to test new hypotheses; enhancement of recruitment of ethnic minority subjects to clinical investigations; conducting controlled studies of treatments for behavioral symptoms in Alzheimer's dementia; planning and developing future pharmacological work. The core has been in operation only since September, 1992. Current objectives are: To further develop the administrative structure to efficiently coordinate and develop clinical pharmacological research, involving comprehensive documentation, evaluation of patients, assessing the validity and reliability of evaluation methods and results; and providing long-term follow-up of former and current research subjects to facilitate clinical investigations and evaluation of various therapies and interventions directed toward treatment an management of AD patients, including pilot, phase I and phase II clinical evaluations; characterization of the pharmacokinetics, including the design and implementation of dose escalation and safety studies; to enhance recruitment of ethnic-minority subjects to the pharmacology core, ADRC Clinical Core, Spanish-speaking program, and to the satellite program: to undertake pilot studies of both cognitively and behavioral active medications in AD patients with symptomatic behaviors such as agitation, psychosis and major depression; to provide consultative and educational resources on investigational medications and the clinical pharmacology of AD to other ADRC components, to the community; and to cooperate with other ADRC clinical and basic research programs in the acquisition of research specimens and measures.