CORE-- NEUROPATHOLOGY

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The UC Davis Alzheimer's Disease Center Neuropathology Core has its overall goal to define the cause of dementia during life and to relate findings obtained during life, such as clinical diagnoses, cognitive function measurements, and neuroimaging to neuropathological substrates. The major goals are to obtain brain autopsies in ADC patients and controls that have been clinically evaluated in the longitudinal cohort, describe and diagnoses all brain lesions found at autopsy, especially changes related to AD pathology and cerebrovascular pathology, correlate these neuropathological diagnoses with the clinical and neuroimaging findings in each patient, and offer well-preserved autopsy brain tissues to research workers in our own and other institutions. The Neuropathology Core will continue the previous practice of working closely with the Clinical Core to ensure that autopsies are obtained on subjects of interest. This includes those individuals enrolled in the Longitudinal Cohort who are particularly likely to also show pathological changes related to cerebrovascular disease (CVD). The Neuropathology Core has developed, and will continue to refine, methods to chart the location and severity of CVD post mortem in the expectation that this precise level of analysis will permit us to improve our ability to partition the relative importance of Alzheimer and cerebrovascular changes to causing the dementia. In addition to these measurements of CVD the core will make measurements of AD and Lewy body pathology using standardized criteria, and will seek to carefully describe the pathological findings in other and unusual causes of dementia. Other important features of the Core are regular clinicopathological conferences, a hierarchical approach to dementia diagnosis when mixed causes are present, a large and well-documented inventory of tissue samples, and a detailed database that is fully integrated with the Biostatistics and Data Management Core.