Study of delusions and cognitive decline

 
   Lead Investigator:    Saanika Venkatesh
   Institution      :    St. Michael's Hospital
   E-Mail           :    venkateshs@smh.ca
   Proposal ID      :    1197



   Proposal Description:
   We will identify patients with diagnosed AD/PD or preclinical conditions (MCI) who have available successive imaging, clinical assessments and neuropathology data. We will exclude patients with a significant history of head trauma, neurologic disease, psychiatric illness or dementia other than AD/PD.    Longitudinal data on patients will be gathered including demographic (age, gender, education), clinical (including cognitive test scores, functional scores and NPI-scores), imaging (including MRI, fMRI, PET tau, PET amyloid) and neuropathology (APO-E status, CSF tau, CSF beta-amyloid, neuritic plaques, neurofibrillary tangles). Patients will be classified as psychosis positive (P+) versus psychosis negative (P-) based on their NPI scores.  Psychosis for the purpose of our analyses will be defined as the presence of delusions with or without hallucinations at any point in time. After ensuring samples are matched for age, gender and education we will compare rates of grey matter atrophy along with changes in clinical data and biomarkers including tau, amyloid and white matter disease burden.