see Sunday May 19th Edition of the Wisconsin State Journal

This is an overview of neuroimaging reseearch being conducted at the UWSMPH with an emphasis on AD.

Ozioma Okonkwo, PhD, was promoted to Assistant Professor, effective December 1, 2012. Congratulations!

The Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center (ADRC) would like to invite you to our 11th Annual November Lecture on Alzheimer’s disease. This educational program is free and open to the community.

“Your Aging Brain and Alzheimer’s Disease: What’s Normal and What to Worry About”
Presented by:

• Sanjay Asthana, M.D.
• Cynthia Carlsson, M.D.
• Mark Sager, M.D.
• Carey Gleason, Ph.D.
• Sterling Johnson, Ph.D.

Research updates and information on clinical trials for Alzheimer’s disease will also be provided.

Date: Tuesday, November 13, 2012
No RSVP is necessary

Location: Blackhawk Church
9620 Brader Way
Middleton, WI 53562

CEU Credits Available: (.3 units)

Local Alzheimer’s Resource Fair and Light Refreshments: 5-6pm

Presentation: 6-8:30pm

Special thanks to our 2012 program sponsors:
Wisconsin Geriatric Education Center,
Alzheimer’s & Demencia Alliance, Alzheimer’s Association,
Azura Memory Care, Coventry Village, Lighthouse of Sun Prairie,and Midwest Home Care

Every day, more than 5 million Americans face Alzheimer’s disease, over 15 million people provide care for these individuals and millions of family members, friends and co-workers wish for a future without Alzheimer’s disease. Joining others across the country, Dr. Barbara Bendlin and Alex Birdsill are participating in The Longest DayTM, a sunrise-to-sunset relay event to raise funds for the care, support and research efforts of the Alzheimer’s Association. Connect with the cause via the Alzheimer’s Association website.

Sterling Johnson, PhD, was promoted to full Professor, effective July 1st, 2012. Congratulations!

Dr. Ben Austin and research specialist Alex Birdsill were recognized for their outstanding research projects at the Department of Medicine Research Day. Their research posters made the top ten posters from over one hundred entries.

Dr. Barbara Bendlin received an R01 grant to study early brain changes in people at risk for Alzheimer’s disease. Her grant will focus on determining the extent to which myelinated axons are damaged at early disease stages.

Congratulations to Dr. Ozioma Okonkwo for his newly awarded Diversity Supplement grant from NIH. His project is titled “Neuromorphometric alterations in middle-aged adults with family history of Alzheimer’s disease: Relationship to genetic variants” and will characterize the earliest neuromorphometric changes that accompany Alzheimer’s disease.
Additionally, he will will investigate the potential influence of candidate genetic variants on these neuromorphometric changes. The project proposes to use sophisticated, yet clinically-available and readily deployable neuroimaging data and analytic tools.

Dr. Ozioma Okonkwo, PhD, has been awarded a 2-year pilot grant to identify antecedent biomarkers of Alzheimer’s disease in cerebrospinal fluid. The project proposes a novel and powerful approach for the identification of cerebrospinal biomarkers using a combination of mass spectrometry, advanced neuroimaging, and machine learning, to potentially tag AD in its earliest preclinical stages.

Congratulations to Sterling Johnson, PhD, for the funding of his R01 grant titled: “The Effect of Calorie Restriction on Brain Aging”. Dr. Johnson’s grant is focused on determining the effect of caloric restriction on brain morphology, cognitive function, and fine motor function. Additionally, Dr. Johnson will study the mechanisms that underlie the protective effects of caloric restriction on brain and cognitive function.

Dr. Auriel Willette, who completed his PhD in the Department of Psychology at UW-Madison has taken a new position at the National Institute on Aging in Baltimore MD. He will be continuing his research on caloric restriction and working with esteemed researcher in aging, Mark Mattson.

Dr. Catherine Gallagher, MD, was awarded a Merit Review Award from the Veteran’s Administration. Her 4-year project will use brain imaging measures to understand interactions between fronto-striatal and fronto-cerebellar networks in Parkinson disease and to relate these measures to the nature, severity, and laterality of motor and cognitive symptoms. Congratulations!

Johnson and Singh together with Rick Chappell, Maritza Dowling, and Cindy Carlsson received a 3 year grant to start in January 2012 from the Wisconsin Partnership Program to study machine learning methods for better prediction of AD. The goal is to study MCI and asymptomatic people at risk for AD with multimodal prediction methods. This research is significant because it will provide tools for better prediction using all available information; the project will also improve clinical trial designs by reducing sample sizes needed to determine whether a drug has efficacy allowing drug discovery to occur quicker and at less cost. The team area all investigators in the Wisconsin ADRC.

Brain Team Extreme recently dominated the fields in the annual UW Hospital and Clinics 6th Annual Employee Kickball tournament. Coming close(ish) to winning, they’re looking forward to training for next year’s gold!

Dr. Bendlin was recently interviewed by WKOW Channel 27 regarding her current research study examining biomarkers for AD in asymptomatic people at risk. Click here to read the article

Feb 5, 2011. Sterling Johnson was the program chair for the 39th Annual meeting of the International Neuropsychological Society held in Boston Feb 2-5, 2011 – a program that (despite the treacherous weather) was a remarkable success! Presenters in this year’s program were many distinguished researchers doing cutting-edge neuropsychological research – including Randy Buckner, Jeremy Schmahmann, Daniel Schacter, Mark Bondi, Sue Corkin, Robin Morris, Reisa Sperling, Keith Yeates, Stephen Rao and many others. Barbara Bendlin, PhD and Michele Ries PhD were program committee members, and Michele presented data regarding brain correlates of Alzheimer-related changes in self-awareness in the Symposium: Self and Awareness in Dementia. Congratulations to all involved on an outstanding conference!

The Fall 2010 edition of the Institute on Aging Newsletter features some of our recent research and also two of our lab members who are supported by the Wisconsin Institute on Aging NIH Training Grant: Kim Farbota, a graduate student in Neuroscience, and Auriel Willette, a post-doctoral fellow.

The Wisconsin Quarterly, the UW School of Medicine and Public Health alumni magazine describes the Wisconsin Registry for Alzheimer’s Prevention and some of our recent findings in the 2010 Fall issue in an article entitled Alzheimer’s Prevention Registry Shines Light on Earliest Signs of Disease

The WRAP project received network television coverage on ABC’s Good Morning America. See the video here

The WRAP cohort is the largest group of asymptomatic people at risk for late onset AD. The cohort is studied with observational assessments including cognition, laboratory and imaging procedures. The WRAP project is described in more detail on the Wisconsin Alzheimer’s Institute website.

WADRC researchers, Dr. Barbara Bendlin, and Dr. Michele Ries, took part in a cross-country bicycle relay to raise awareness for the need for increased funding for Alzheimer’s research. The event, sponsored by the Alzheimer’s Association, resulted in the collection of 110,000 signatures for a petition asking Congress to make Alzheimer’s disease a national priority.

Congratulations to Donald McLaren, PhD! Dr. McLaren has just completed his PhD and will be moving to MGH/Harvard for a post-doc starting Sept 1. Donald has made a huge impact on the lab and will be missed. No doubt he will have many successes at MGH and will certainly become a vital member of Reisa Sperling’s lab, just as he has been for us. We wish you well Donald!

Auriel Willette, PhD, just won the new investigator award from the Institute on Aging and will receive the award at the IOA Colloquium in September. This was based largely on his heroic work and several publications on the rhesus diet study.

Guofan Xu, MD/PhD was awarded a new investigator award from the Alzheimer’s Association based on a brilliant idea he had for improving the quantification of ASL perfusion. He now joins the elite crowd including Dr. Bendlin and Dr. Ries as recipients of this very competitive award.

Very Long Poly-T lengths of TOMM40 523, a gene recently discovered to influence the age of onset in Alzheimer’s disease, also appears to be correlated with performance on memory exams and Posterior Cingulate gray matter volume in healthy late middle-aged adults. We are excited to share details this week at the Alzheimer’s Association International Conference on Alzheimer’s Disease (ICAD).

Check out the ICAD press release, as well as articles from the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health and Bloomberg news.

In the News:

• ICAD 2010: Hot Topics Press Release
• Bloomberg: Alzheimer’s Gene Acts on Middle-Aged People, Two U.S. Studies Indicate
• UW Health: Researchers Discover Possible Way to Predict Alzheimer’s

Thanks to all who joined our team for the 2009 Alzheimer’s Walk, and thanks for all who helped!

Barbara Bendlin, PhD and Michele Ries, PhD each received a new investigator grant from the Alzheimer’s Association. Dr. Bendlin’s study will focus on early white matter changes and cardiovascular risk factors in people who are already at high risk for AD. Dr. Ries is studying apathy in people with MCI to determine if this neurobehavioral feature adds predictive value and whether it is associated with a characteristic pattern of brain function. Congratulations to Drs. Bendlin and Ries!

Support the Alzheimer’s Association Memory Walk ‘09, October 3rd, by joining the Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center’s team. Join our team or make a donation!

Our new website is live! You can now get an extensive list of our publications, see important resources like our Rhesus Brain Atlas, or check out our bios.

The site was built using Ruby on Rails, a flexible and powerful framework which makes it quick and easy to update, and the UW Department of Medicine has provided bandwidth. Finally, many thanks to Madison graphic designer Denis at 38one.com for the work on design and layout.

Writing July 10 in the journal Science, a team of researchers at UW-Madison, the Wisconsin National Primate Research Center and the William S. Middleton Memorial Veterans Hospital reports that a nutritious but reduced-calorie diet blunts aging and significantly delays the onset of such age-related disorders as cancer, diabetes, cardiovascular disease and brain atrophy. UW Press release

Barbara Bendlin PhD, a scientist in the Wisconsin ADRC was awarded a pilot grant through the University of Wisconsin’s Institute for Clinical and Translational Research (link to ICTR). Her project will focus on the relationship between preclinical white matter changes in people at risk for AD and CSF biomarkers.

Researchers announce the creation of Wisconsin’s very first Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center (W-ADRC). The Wisconsin ADRC is funded by a grant from the National Institute on Aging (NIA) and the National Institute of Health (NIH). The Wisconsin ADRC will be a research facility based out of the UW-Madison’s Department of Geriatrics in the School of Medicine and Public Health, and the Wm. S. Middleton Memorial Veterans Hospital. The Wisconsin ADRC was the only new facility to be recognized by the NIH with this award for the funding year of 2009.

This grant award will further fund the research of the Wisconsin Comprehensive Memory Program’s (WCMP) former efforts in areas of Alzheimer’s disease treatment and prevention research. The major focus of the Wisconsin ADRC is on preclinical and early diagnosis and progression of AD. It will expand the scientific objectives of the NIH-funded Wisconsin Registry for Alzheimer’s Prevention (WRAP), significantly enhancing care of Wisconsin residents suffering from the devastations of AD.

The major focus of the Wisconsin ADRC, and perhaps the most important characteristic of this Center, is to identify novel diagnostic tests and potential therapies for the prevention of AD at a stage when patients have no clinical symptoms (preclinical stage). It is anticipated that such therapies will help reduce the burgeoning number of individuals projected to suffer from AD.

While most function Centers are based in the fields of neurology and psychology, this is the first time in NIH history that a geriatrics-based ADRC has been funded. The Wisconsin ADRC will build upon the remarkable strengths of the University of Wisconsin and the work of the Wisconsin Comprehensive Memory Program to provide state-of-the-art resources, infrastructure, and expertise in Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and related illnesses.

Drs. Cathy Gallagher and Michele Ries were recently awarded pilot grants through the University of Wisconsin’s Institute for Clinical and Translational Research. Dr. Gallagher’s project will focus on MRI measurements of basal ganglia perfusion and connectivity in Parkinson disease. Dr. Ries’ project will use functional MRI to examine alterations in brain physiology relating to impaired awareness of memory deficit in people with mild cognitive impairment and Alzheimer’s disease.

Dr. Sterling Johnson has been honored by three leading Alzheimers associations as one of 3 recipients of the Tomorrow’s Leader Award for 2008. The award from the Alzheimer’s Association, Cure Alzhimers Fund and the Lou Ruvo Brain Institute will help support our research on cognitive disorders of memory and self-awareness. Thanks again to these organizations for their support!

Congratulations to Sterling Johnson for being awarded a Presidential Early Career Award (PECASE) from the White House! The PECASE is a prestigous award that “represents the highest honor that any young scientist or engineer can receive in the United States.” —whitehouse.gov
Dr. Johnson “… was chosen in recognition of his work on neural disorders related to aging and brain damage . Using brain imaging techniques, he studies patient recovery from traumatic brain injuries and is working toward early identification of Alzheimer’s disease prior to the onset of irreversible damage.” —UW News