Scientist Says Just 30 Minutes Of Your Time Twice A Year Could Help Cure Alzheimer’s

“If you want to do something to hasten a cure for Alzheimer’s, join the Brain Health Registry,” said Michael W. Weiner, M.D. A professor of radiology and biomedical engineering, medicine, psychiatry and neurology at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), Weiner is the principle investigator of the Brain Health Registry (BHR) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH)-funded Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI)—a 14-year longitudinal study of over 1,500 subjects at 60 sites across the United States and Canada and one of the largest observational studies in the world using MRI, PET and biomarkers to study Alzheimer’s Disease. Dr. Michael Weiner, professor of radiology and biomedical engineering, medicine, psychiatry and neurology at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), and principle investigator of the Brain Health Registry (BHR). Photo Courtesy of the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). Weiner launched BHR five years ago as a low-cost, scalable approach in response to the “very expensive, high tech approach” of ADNI to studying Alzheimer’s. The BHR’s questionnaires and brain tests serve as tools that help researchers identify normal elderly people at risk for cognitive decline and dementia and provide data to facilitate the work of other investigators. “I have been doing research for 50 years. I have been doing Alzheimer’s research for 25 years,” he said. “The overall goal of our field is to identify people at risk of developing Mild Cognitive Impairment and dementia and to help develop treatments to prevent them. But one reason the research is going slow is that we are not getting enough volunteers for research studies. We want everyone. We want African American, Spanish and Asian people. We want blue collar, white collar, working people, high school graduates, college graduates and those with advance degrees. We want our registry to look like America.” […]

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