Understanding the progression of neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s dementia can help us carefully monitor patients, identify key biomarkers and ensure individuals receive the best treatment and care possible for their stage of disease. The Centre for Studies on Prevention of Alzheimer’s Disease (StoP-AD), at the Research Centre of the Douglas Mental Health University Institute, aims to do just that, pursuing innovative studies of the “presymptomatic” phase of Alzheimer Disease.

The StoP-AD Centre’s main resource is the observational study PREVENT-AD (Pre-symptomatic Evaluation of Experimental or Novel Treatments for AD). PREVENT-AD is an open naturalistic study dataset for pre-symptomatic individuals at risk for Alzheimer-like dementia. 349 participants contributed to the PREVENT-AD dataset, which includes up to five years of longitudinal imaging data, cerebral fluid biochemistry, neurosensory capacities, cognitive, genetic, and medical information.

The PREVENT-AD team hopes that by making datasets from large cohorts available to the global research community, they might help catalyze Alzheimer’s disease research. The dataset is available through the Canadian Open Neuroscience Platform, which also links to the openly accessible imaging data at LORIS. Sensitive information is accessible to qualified researchers.

Read more about PREVENT-AD in their recent publication.