An official website of the United States government
AD-Related Dementias Focus
Evaluate pragmatic approaches to objectively detect cognitive impairment and link to quality care when a patient, care partner, or clinician reports cognitive, behavioral, or functional changes.
2027 RFA-NS-17-012: Detecting Cognitive Impairment, Including Dementia, in Primary Care and Other Everyday Clinical Settings for the General Public and in Health Disparities Populations (UG3/UH3) RFA-NS-22-009: Detecting Cognitive Impairment, Including Dementia, in Primary Care and Other Everyday Clinical Settings for the General Public and Health Equity, Pragmatic Clinical Trials (U01 Clinical Trial Required) RFA-NS-22-056: Treatments for Lewy Body Dementias and Frontotemporal Dementias--Exploratory Clinical Trial (U01 Clinical Trial Required) RFA-NS-24-001: Using Multimodal Biomarkers to Differentially Diagnose ADRDs for Clinical Trials (U19 Clinical Trial Optional) RFA-NS-25-014: Mechanisms of Cognitive Fluctuations in ADRD Populations (R01 - Clinical Trial Optional) 9.K In Progress Detect cognitive impairment when a patient or relative voices a concern to health care providers. DN 2016 ADRD Summit: Multiple Etiology Dementias (MED) Focus Area 1: Improved Diagnostic Skills in the Community, Recommendation 1 2022 ADRD Summit: Multiple Etiology Dementias (MED) Milestone 1, Priority 1 News: NIH forms new consortium to improve detection of cognitive impairment, including dementia DetectCID Precision Aging Network: Closing the Gap Between Cognitive Healthspan and Human Lifespan Select projects funded in FY22
- Complete at least three clinical trials to validate assessment paradigms to detect cognitive impairment in large and diverse populations in primary care practice and other every day clinical care settings.
Summary of Key Accomplishments
NIH-funded researchers are developing a variety of tools for diagnosing dementia, including a tablet-based screening tool for early dementia screening in primary care and sensitive blood tests that can discriminate between different AD/ADRDs. A recent research study has shown promising results with a variation of PET imaging, called fluorodeoxyglucose (FDG) PET imaging, to differentiate people living with MCI-DLB from those living with MCI-AD. These findings demonstrate that FDG PET may be useful for detecting the prodromal stage of dementia with Lewy bodies. NIH-funded researchers are also researching methods to differentiate frontotemporal lobar degeneration from Alzheimer’s using PET imaging. Complementing these efforts, NIH released a funding opportunity in FY24 to enable multi-site clinical validation of multimodal biomarkers to differentially diagnose AD/ADRDs for clinical trials.
The key accomplishments summary is current as of July 2024.