Relationships Between Vascular Dementia, Alzheimer's Disease, and Stroke

 
   Lead Investigator:    Juliamaria Coromac
   Institution      :    University of Kansas BRANCH Lab
   E-Mail           :    juliamaria.coromac@ku.edu
   Proposal ID      :    1609



   Proposal Description:
   My name is Juliamaria Coromac and I am a fourth-year undergraduate student at the University of Kansas. I am a research assistant in the Behavioral Research in Aging, Neuroscience, Cognition, and Health (BRANCH) Lab, interested in analyzing data on patient's stroke history and dementia diagnoses.                  Upon writing a literature review that explored relationships between stroke and various dementia diagnoses, I found peer reviewed articles that studied potential links between strokes, Alzheimer?s Disease, and vascular dementia.    In one particular study conducted by Imfeld et al. (2012), the authors explored three subtypes of stroke (ischemic, hemorrhagic, or transient ischemic attacks) in patients with Alzheimer?s Disease (AD), vascular dementia (VD), or without dementia. They analyzed whether antipsychotic medications prescribed to these patients may cause increased stroke risks, relating to their diagnoses. They concluded that patients with VD, not AD, had a higher risk of developing ischemic stroke than those without a VD or AD diagnosis. When analyzing antipsychotic medications, they found patients with AD, not VD, were associated with an increased risk in transient ischemic strokes.                               With this study in mind, I want to further investigate these relationships between vascular incidents and neurodegenerative diseases. I plan to analyze strokes in patients diagnosed with Alzheimer?s Disease, vascular dementia, frontotemporal dementia, and different levels of MCI. I am interested in the presence of a stroke history, the number of stroke occurrences, the type of stroke (transient ischemic, hemorrhagic, etc), and stroke measures such as Hachinski Ischemic scores.                                                          I hypothesize that patients with a prevalent stroke history will have a higher rate of diagnosis of AD or VD than those without a stroke history or patients diagnosed with FTLD or without a neurological condit