This announcement gets me excited. My mother suffers from Alzheimer's and we really benefited from an early diagnosis of her Alzheimer's disease. It is clear to me the earlier the diagnosis and the sooner the appropriate medication is prescribed the better the outcome.

I have met many people suffering from an early stage of dementia in the last several years. Frequently, the problem is going undiagnosed.  Just as often, the children don't know what to do and what actions to take. I believe this is very common. Let's face it, the average person has no idea about what to do. It is common to get overwhelmed and "scared" when Alzheimer's strikes.

"For treatments now in development to be optimally beneficial for patients, we have to find ways of diagnosing Alzheimer's disease as early as possible," says DIAN principal investigator John C. Morris, M.D., the Harvey A. and Dorismae Hacker Friedman Distinguished Professor of Neurology and director of the ADRC. "That's likely to happen much more quickly as we move from studying the few family members in St. Louis with inherited Alzheimer's to the 300 family members who will be accessible through the DIAN."

WUSTL to lead new international Alzheimer's disease research network

The Alzheimer's Disease Research Center (ADRC) at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis will lead a six-year, $16 million international research collaboration dedicated to understanding inherited forms of Alzheimer's disease. The National Institute on Aging (NIA) will fund the project.

Forms of Alzheimer's disease linked to inherited mutations are rare but have provided scientists with many important insights into the more common "sporadic" forms of the disease. Because individuals with these inherited forms of Alzheimer's are widely dispersed geographically, there have been too few at any one center to conduct extensive research. Through the newly created Dominantly Inherited Alzheimer's Network (DIAN), investigators hope to organize and enroll a broad pool of qualified volunteers.

"For treatments now in development to be optimally beneficial for patients, we have to find ways of diagnosing Alzheimer's disease as early as possible," says DIAN principal investigator John C. Morris, M.D., the Harvey A. and Dorismae Hacker Friedman Distinguished Professor of Neurology and director of the ADRC. "That's likely to happen much more quickly as we move from studying the few family members in St. Louis with inherited Alzheimer's to the 300 family members who will be accessible through the DIAN."

DIAN will include Washington University; a consortium involving Harvard University, Massachusetts General Hospital and Brown University; Columbia University; Indiana University; the University of California at Los Angeles; the University College of London's Institute of Neurology at Queen's Square; and a consortium of the universities of Brisbane, Perth and Sydney in Australia.

DIAN is modeled after the Adult-Children Study at the ADRC. That study regularly conducts detailed physical and mental assessments of healthy middle-aged children whose parents have been diagnosed with Alzheimer's. Researchers hope this will help them to identify telltale changes in the central nervous system decades before the symptoms of Alzheimer's disease become apparent.