The Wisconsin Registry for Alzheimer’s Prevention was awarded a renewal grant from the National Institutes of Health.
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UW-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health Professor Sterling Johnson said Alzheimer’s disease may begin decades before symptoms become obvious.
“We still don’t know why some people get the disease and others do not, but the WRAP study is on the path to answering these questions and these new early-detection tests are critical,” Johnson said in a press release.
WRAP, which began in 2001, is the largest family history study of Alzheimer’s disease in the world. Approximately 1,580 volunteers, 73 percent of whom have a parental history of Alzheimer’s disease, visit every two years to participate in cognitive testing, answer questions about their lifestyles and have their vital signs measured.
WRAP is looking for more participants from historically underrepresented racial and ethnic groups including Hispanic, African-American and Native American communities. In doing so, the organization hopes to understand why Alzheimer’s disease occurs at higher rates in populations of color in the U.S. than in non-Hispanic white people.
Johnson, along with other members of WRAP, hopes to use the grant to study these patterns as well as many others.
“Ten years ago, we didn’t have the tools to diagnose Alzheimer’s disease with precision and confidence because we had limited ability to detect exactly what was happening in the brain as the disease established and progressed,” Johnson said in the release. “Now we have clear methods for detecting the pathological features in the brain. With these tools, we’re focused on identifying how to prevent or reduce those features.”
