The largest study of early-onset Alzheimer's disease in the United States is expanding internationally, becoming one of the largest programs of its kind in the world. The Longitudinal Early-Onset Alzheimer's Disease Study (LEADS), headquartered at the Indiana University School of Medicine, is growing to include five new sites in Europe and South America, in addition to its 18 existing sites in the U.S.
Global expansion of the study (International Longitudinal Early-Onset Alzheimer's Disease Study, or iLEADS) is supported by a two-year, over $700,000 grant from the Alzheimer's Association, which was funded entirely by the association's Greater Indiana Chapter. The grant will support new sites in Buenos Aires, Argentina; Amsterdam, the Netherlands; Barcelona, Spain; London, England; and Malmö, Sweden.
"The Greater Indiana Chapter is honored to fund this important research and incredibly proud of Indiana's global leadership in the fight against Alzheimer's disease and all other dementias," said Natalie Sutton, executive director for the Alzheimer's Association Greater Indiana Chapter.
Early-onset Alzheimer's disease is a rare form of Alzheimer's, affecting only 5% of the more than 6.5 million Americans living with the neurodegenerative disease. It typically appears in people ages 40 to 64, many of whom don't have a family history of the disease.
"Although the U.S. is a really nice melting pot, we might see that populations within different countries present differently for early-onset Alzheimer's disease," said Liana Apostolova, MD, MS, a Distinguished Professor and the Barbara and Peer Baekgaard Professor of Alzheimer's Disease Research in the Department of Neurology at the IU School of Medicine. "We have already developed a knowledge base of all these different modalities of research — cognitive, clinical, genetics, pathology and imaging. Our goal is to seamlessly include the international data into one larger repository and study the disease globally."
LEADS, which officially launched in the U.S. in 2018, is a 700-person study of early-onset Alzheimer's disease in people between the ages of 40 and 64. There are 100 cognitively normal participants, as well as 600 participants who have cognitive impairment — largely due to early-onset Alzheimer’s disease or mild cognitive impairment from Alzheimer's disease.
Apostolova, who is also the associate dean of Alzheimer's disease research at the IU School of Medicine, leads the study with her co-principal investigators Gil Rabinovici, MD, of the University of California-San Francisco; Brad Dickerson, MD, of Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School; and Maria Carrillo, PhD, of the Alzheimer's Association.
The study has amassed $78 million in grant funding since 2017 and was the largest National Institutes of Health grant to the IU School of Medicine from 2017 to 2023.
iLEADS will support new partnerships with leading dementia experts at its new international sites. Apostolova said these experts are already clinically assessing and treating rare presentations of early-onset Alzheimer's disease, such as the language and visual variants of Alzheimer's disease.
"LEADS and iLEADS give us great hope that we can better understand early-onset Alzheimer's disease," said Heather M. Snyder, PhD, vice president of medical and scientific relations at the Alzheimer's Association. "By studying Alzheimer's in this younger group, we can identify new potential paths to treatment in both younger- and late-onset forms of the disease."
About the IU School of Medicine
The IU School of Medicine is the largest medical school in the U.S. and is annually ranked among the top medical schools in the nation by U.S. News & World Report. The school offers high-quality medical education, access to leading medical research and rich campus life in nine Indiana cities, including rural and urban locations consistently recognized for livability. According to the Blue Ridge Institute for Medical Research, the IU School of Medicine ranks No. 13 in 2023 National Institutes of Health funding among all public medical schools in the country.
Writer: Ben Middelkamp, bmiddel@iu.edu
Source: Liana Apostolova, lapostol@iu.edu
For more news, visit the IU School of Medicine Newsroom: medicine.iu.edu/news
Follow us on X: @IUMedSchool