Fort Worth Researchers to Investigate Alzheimer's Disease in Latin Communities

The University of North Texas Health Science Center (HSC) will host one of the largest Alzheimer's disease research studies up to now, with researchers awarded a grant expected to total $45 million from the U.S. National Institute on Aging, reports NBC 5 Dallas-Fort Worth . The five-year grant will pursue insights into the biological framework of Alzheimer's disease in multi-ethnic populations and its divergence from that of non-Latino whites. "We are going to be looking at how Alzheimer's disease pathology in the brain, the basic underlying brain changes, what do they look like, how they progress, and how they impact people from diverse communities," said HSC Professor Sid O'Bryant. The HSC will establish an imaging center that will allow researchers to perform two positron emission tomography (PET) scans on every participant. Investigators will look for beta-amyloid or tau proteins, and two years later each participant will undergo two more PET scans for comparison. This will enable researchers to note differences in Mexican Americans and non-Latino whites. "The whole point of this study is to develop precision medicine for treating and preventing Alzheimer's disease among all communities," said O'Bryant. "It's not about treating this one group or other group, but we can't understand the disease if we can't understand it in everybody."