NIH awards Cleveland Clinic $10.7M for Lewy body dementia study
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The NIH has awarded a $10.7 million 5-year renewal grant to Cleveland Clinic to expand a national research consortium focused on improving the diagnosis and treatments for dementia with Lewy bodies.
The Dementia with Lewy Bodies Consortium was established in 2017 and is a centralized effort to create a national, coordinated registry for clinical data.
The research team will be led by James Leverenz, MD, director of the Cleveland Clinic’s Lou Ruvo Center for Brain Health. The study will use longitudinal data from expanded patient cohorts to identify biomarkers that can assist with diagnosis, detect disease progression and measure response to treatment.
“Dementia with Lewy bodies is the second-most common cause of dementia in the elderly, but it remains challenging to diagnose,” Leverenz said in a press release from Cleveland Clinic. “Through our establishment of a national registry we have generated a significant amount of data and biofluids that have been shared with investigators through a collaboration with the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke and the National Institute on Aging. With this new funding, we can now use that important information to improve diagnosis, identify biomarkers for disease and develop much needed new therapies for patients.”
According to the release, more than 1.4 million Americans have dementia with Lewy bodies. However, there are no drugs approved to treat the symptoms nor treatments that offer a cure for the progressive neurodegenerative disorder.
“This consortium addresses this issue by bringing together a group of experts and providing the infrastructure to study a large number of patients from across the country,” Leverenz said. “By expanding our collaborative research, our aim is to better understand the biology of this disease and improve outcomes for patients.”