Analysis Core Rio Grande Valley AD-RCMAR

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

Project Summary – Analysis Core The number of people living with Alzheimer's disease (AD) is expected to almost triple by 2050. Understanding and restoring cognitive function is critical to improving patients´ lives and minimize the catastrophic strains on the health care system, families, and the federal budget. The understanding of the determinants of Alzheimer’s disease risk and the consequences of disease constitutes a complex problem. The Analysis Core (AnC) of the AD Resource Center for Minority Aging Research (AD-RCMAR) at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley (UTRGV) aims to support projects in order to examine these large problems and to add to our knowledge base about age-related cognitive decline by combining several scientific methodologies at multiple levels of analysis. The proposed AD-RCMAR will encourage faculty from psychiatry, neurology, behavioral science, neuroscience, epidemiology, genetics, molecular biology, biostatistics, bioinformatics and other areas to focus on the specific vulnerabilities of AD in Hispanic and other minority populations. AD-RCMAR research will be conducted through population-based epidemiology, clinical studies, and work with animal models, and in vitro cell systems. The breadth and depth of likely AD-RCMAR projects will generate particular needs for state-of-the-art analytic approaches that address longitudinal, high-dimensional, and integrative treatment of data at phenotypic, genetic, and environmental (i.e., non-genetic) levels as well as the consideration of interactions between causal domains. The proposed AnC is designed to meet these needs by providing access to experts with a broad range of complementary expertise who will be able to work collaboratively with AD-RCMAR investigators to conduct any needed specified analyses. The overall function of the proposed core focuses, as required by the program announcement, is on the integrative analysis of data sets across multiple broad domains including social, economic, behavioral, psychological, biological and genetic factors. We will achieve our objectives through the following Specific Aims: 1) to maximize cross-study and cross-modality analysis among AD-RCMAR projects, we will organize and make available existing data sets of aging Hispanics/minorities into a central repository hosted in our high performance compute cluster at the South Texas Diabetes and Obesity Institute including the Genetics of Brain Structure and Function Study with 2,000 participants who are members of large Mexican American families, the lMaracaibo Aging Study consisting of ~4,500 Hispanic individuals living in Venezuela, and the Kolla Population Study which focuses on an isolated Andean population in Argentina comprised of ~250 individuals; 2) the AnC will provide analytical expertise and training in relevant statistical, statistical genetic and bioinformatics methods appropriate for complex, multisystem and high dimensional data including a novel integrative analytical framework for diverse large data sets; 3) the AnC will disseminate scientific information regarding measurement tools, novel methodological developments and new data resources produced by and/or available to the AD-RCMAR.