Estimating AD-PS scores for African Americans Lead Investigator: Ramon Casanova Institution : Wake Forest School of Medicine E-Mail : casanova@wakehealth.edu Proposal ID : 1166 Proposal Description: The pathological processes that lead to Alzheimer?s disease (AD) develop decades before clinical diagnoses17. AD treatment trials conducted in clinically diagnosed AD patients and patients with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) due to AD have failed. Because interventions that are applied earlier in the disease process, likely have a greater chance of success, early detection of AD pathogenesis is of paramount importance to facilitate development of effective treatments. While very often studies are focused on the AD biomarkers of ??-amyloid and tau deposition, less attention have been given to studies focused on markers of neurodegeneration. Neurodegenerative processes in AD are ill defined, often quantified as general atrophy or loosely defined as atrophy in key brain regions. Our group has developed approaches to quantify structural patterns of neurodegeneration in the brain that are associated with AD pathology. Previously, we developed a biomarker of AD neurodegeneration called Alzheimer?s disease Pattern Similarity (AD-PS) score using the Alzheimer?s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) and we have demonstrated our ability to extend this measure to other datasets by estimating and validating it using data from the Women?s Health Initiative Memory Study (WHIMS) participants. However, this work have been developed for overwhelmingly white populations. Our main goal is to create a version of the AD-PS scores specific for African Americans. We are lacking brain MRIs of African Americans diagnosed as AD. We intend to evaluate the use of the sample available in the NAAC database for the creation of these AD-PS scores. Literature 1. Casanova R, Barnard Ryan, Sarah Gaussoin, Santiago Saldana, Rapp S, Espeland MA, Chen JC, Estimating Alzheimer?s disease anatomical risk across i