Computational Tools for Early Diagnosis of Memory Disorders

The Virtual Physiological Human: DementiA Research Enabled by IT (VPH-DARE@IT) is a four-year IT-project funded through the European Union (EU). The project will develop multiscale models of the ageing brain in order to account simultaneously for the patient-specific biochemical, metabolic and biomechanical brain substrate, as well as for genetic, clinical, demographic and lifestyle determinants. An integrated clinical decision support platform will be validated and tested by access to a dozen databases of international cross-sectional and longitudinal studies.

Modeling approaches developed by using the retrospective databases will be tested using a new prospective cohort that will be collected in Kuopio as a part of the VPH-DARE@IT project. The study population at university of Eastern Finland (UEF) will be a total of 120 subjects: 20 healthy controls (HC), 20 mild to moderate Alzheimer's disease (AD) patients, 20 vascular dementia (VAD) patients, 20 fronto-temporal dementia (FTD) patients and 40 subjects with mild cognitive impairment (MCI). This study is referred as VPH-DARE@IT Prospective study in Kuopio or "ProsKuopio".

Inclusion criteria

Inclusion criteria

for subjects with dementia (AD, VAD, FTD) - The inclusion criteria will be based on international research criteria:

• Diagnosis of probable AD according to National Institute of Neurological and Communicative Disorders and Stroke Alzheimer's (NINCDS-ADRDA) criteria (McKhann et al.1984) and diagnosis of prodromal AD according to Dubois et al., 2007 criteria
• Diagnosis of FTD according to the clinical diagnostic criteria of Neary et al., 1998
• Diagnosis of VAD according to diagnostic criteria for research studies by the NINDSAIREN International Workshop (Román et al., 1993)

Inclusion criteria

for subjects with MCI

• Referral because of cognitive impairments
• Diagnosis criteria for amnestic and nonamnestic MCI (Petersen, 2004, Petersen and Morris, 2005)

Inclusion criteria

for control subjects

• Mini-mental state examination (MMSE) score above or equal to 27
• Overall score on the Clinical Dementia Rating (CDR) scale of 0

Exclusion criteria

Exclusion criteria

for all subjects

• Other causes of dementia
• Obvious brain, systemic or psychiatric disorders that could potentially affect cognitive functions such as stroke, severe depression, or endocrine disorders

Exclusion criteria

for control subjects and subjects with MCI

• Diagnosis of dementia according to DSM-IV (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 4th Edition) criteria at baseline