Monday, 18 August 2003: 09:00-10:30 | |||
S006 The European Alzheimer’s Disease Consortium (EADC) | |||
| Alzheimer's disease affects about 800 000 new patients every year in Europe. In addition, Alzheimer's disease is directly responsible for 50% of the dependency of aged persons. For these reasons, 45 centres of excellence in Europe decided, under the aegis of the European Commission, to pool their resources to create a European Alzheimer's Disease Consortium in order to conduct large interventional studies on this disorder. Today new perspectives are opening up before us, which require the setting up of large interventional studies (therapeutic as well as other types of study) relating to prevention, treatment and management of the disease or its complications. Such studies need large series of patients, a long follow-up period, and the most advanced technologies of functional exploration. Such resources are currently available within the European Union. However, if these studies are to be conducted, it is indispensable for the necessary resources to be coordinated. This is the task which the European Alzheimer’s Disease Consortium (EADC) has set itself. · The Ictus study: impact of treatment with cholinesterase inhibitors in European AD patients. The principal goal of this prospective observational study (1400 patients) is to ascertain the true impact of cholinesterase inhibitors on the natural course of the disease in clinical practice, by comparing treated and non-treated subjects over a period of two years. Treatment with cholinesterase inhibitors is certainly effective in Alzheimer's disease but the extent and duration of its action must be better evaluated in the long term, together with its real effect on the patient and his or her family in the usual conditions of clinical practice. So 1400 patients with mild to moderate Alzheimer's disease, living at home with an informal carer will be enrolled and followed regularly every six months over a period of two years. The Ictus study will tell us more about the natural history of the disease and the various patterns of management within the European Union. The cost of the disease according to the treatments used and the patterns of management will be studied, and patterns of admission to hospital (emergency admission in particular) and to institutions will also be evaluated. This will enable us to develop European guidelines for the management of AD patients.The Descripa study : development of European guidelines for the detection and diagnosis of predementia states. Its principal aim is to establish a European consensus on identification of subjects with a predementia state. To this end, data from large European studies of subjects with mild cognitive impairment will be pooled. Patient characteristics and cognitive function, neuro-imaging findings and biological markers will be analysed. A cohort of about 800 patients will also be followed prospectively for 4 years. This will enable us to increase our knowledge of predementia states and to validate diagnostic criteria, both for epidemiological studies and for individual clinical practice. | |||
| Chair: | Bruno Vellas | ||
| S006-001 E.A.D.C : Aims, Objectives, Organization Bruno Vellas | |||
| S006-002 The DESCRIPA study Frans Verhey | |||
| S006-003 The ICTUS Study Pierre-Jean Ousset | |||
| S006-004 The Ressource Utilization Dementia tool (R.U.D) Bengt Winblad | |||
| S006-005 The BPSD – EADC Thematic group Philippe H. Robert | |||
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