What We Do

The Network and its activities will have important implications for the management, the diagnosis and the treatment of Alzheimer’s Disease and Frontotemporal lobar degeneration families.

The development of a synergic network for the referral and assessment of autosomal dominant Alzheimer’s Disease and Frontotemporal lobar degeneration could represent a reference for

1. neurologist and practitioners encountering patients with a history of autosomal dominant dementia
2. Italian clinical and research centres willing to implement the developed procedures in their own institution
3. Italian individuals, relatives of patients with familial Alzheimer’s Disease or Frontotemporal lobar degeneration, seeking information about their risk to develop a neurodegenerative disorder.

In terms of diagnosis, the implementation of specific and validated procedures will improve the diagnostic accuracy for patients with Alzheimer’s Disease and Frontotemporal lobar degeneration. Moreover, this Network represents the first attempt at the National level to collect clinical, imaging, neurophysiologic and biological samples in individuals carrying a mutation of Alzheimer’s Disease and Frontotemporal lobar degeneration.

The Network will facilitate the translation of research results into the clinical practice by offering Italian mutation carriers the opportunity to participate in innovative clinical trials. Specifically, the major contributions to translational medicine will be as follows:

• to speed up the implementation of clinical trials across Italian centres through the development of an internationally compliant protocol;
• to facilitate clinical trial recruitment through the development of a registry of cases.

Since the centres involved in the proposal have already described many cases with autosomal dominant Alzheimer’s Disease and Frontotemporal lobar degeneration mutations, the Network will likely build one of the largest registry of these rare cases of dementia.