The Contribution of Vascular Pathology Toward Cognitive Impairment in Older Individuals with Intermediate Braak Stage Tau Pathology.

Background: The pathological features of Alzheimer's disease (AD) are well described but little is known as to how both neurodegeneration and vascular changes might interact in causing cognitive impairment.

Objective: The present study aims to investigate relationships between vascular and AD pathology in cognitively healthy and cognitively impaired individuals with a particular emphasis on those at intermediate Braak tau stages.

Methods: We investigated the interplay between Braak tau stage and measures of vascular pathology as described by the vascular cognitive impairment neuropathology guidelines (VCING) in 185 brains from the Brains for Dementia Research programme and The University of Manchester Longitudinal Study of Cognition in Healthy Old Age.

A Comparative Study of Pathological Outcomes in The University of Manchester Longitudinal Study of Cognition in Normal Healthy Old Age and Brains for Dementia Research Cohorts.

In the present study, we have characterized and compared individuals whose brains were donated as part of The University of Manchester Longitudinal Study of Cognition in Normal Healthy Old Age (UoM) with those donated through the Manchester arm of the UK Brains for Dementia Research (BDR) program. The aim of this study was to investigate how differences in study recruitment may affect final pathological composition of cohort studies. The UoM cohort was established as a longitudinal study of aging and cognition whereas the BDR program was established, prima facie, to collect brains from both demented and non-demented individuals for the purpose of building a tissue research resource.

Molecular phenotyping of a UK population: defining the human serum metabolome.

Phenotyping of 1,200 'healthy' adults from the UK has been performed through the investigation of diverse classes of hydrophilic and lipophilic metabolites present in serum by applying a series of chromatography-mass spectrometry platforms. These data were made robust to instrumental drift by numerical correction; this was prerequisite to allow detection of subtle metabolic differences. The variation in observed metabolite relative concentrations between the 1,200 subjects ranged from less than 5 % to more than 200 %.