PROJECT SUMMARY (Administrative / Biostatistics Core) The SuperAging Consortium includes a network of Sites, Cores, multidisciplinary data collection and two Projects. The Administrative/Biostatistics Core will provide governance and fiscal oversight, maintain scientific integrity, deliver data management and biostatistical support, and harmonize the goals and activities of the Cores, Sites, Research Projects, with each other, with the NIA and with extramural collaborators for the SuperAging Consortium. The Admin/Biostats Core will play a pivotal role in integrating the components of the Consortium so the whole is more than the sum of its parts through three Aims. Aim 1 will provide overall leadership, operational, and administrative support for the SuperAging Consortium including coordinating regular meetings among Cores, Projects, data collection Sites, managing reporting, monitoring, financial and regulatory aspects of the proposal. Aim 2 will establish an Executive Committee with regular meetings and leadership from each of the components of the SuperAging Consortium and the NIA to proactively facilitate research, and the productive utilization of resources generated by the SuperAging Consortium. Aim 3 will appoint a Scientific Advisory Board (SAB) and ensure their recommendations are implemented. Aim 4 will develop and manage a tightly integrated data repository and provide biostatistical support for the SuperAging Consortium. Collectively, these efforts will enable efficient completion of the investigations outlined here as well as additional intramural and extramural collaborative ventures.
PROJECT SUMMARY (Clinical / Imaging): Memory complaints are widespread in aging, and aging is a major risk factor for Alzheimer’s disease (AD), leading to the impression that a gradual loss of memory ability, eventually culminating in dementia, may be a nearly universal consequence of getting old. This Consortium will explore an alternative aging trajectory by studying 80+ year-olds that we have labelled ‘SuperAgers’, who have episodic memory performance that appears to have escaped age-related decline and that remains in the range that is at least normal for 50-60-year-olds. The Clinical/Imaging Core of the SuperAging Consortium will establish standardized enrollment criteria and uniform assessments for the harmonized cross-site characterization of SuperAgers and their Controls. Aim 1 will coordinate enrollment and harmonized data collection on at least 500 participants (300 SuperAgers, 200 Controls) across the United States and Canada into a prospective longitudinal study, which includes health, lifestyle, and neurocognitive assessments, as well as MR imaging, blood samples, and eventual brain donation. Particular emphasis will be placed on recruitment of participants from Sites with strengths in recruitment and sophisticated characterization of older adults. Aim 2 will support studies that confirm and extend previous findings in a larger cohort as well as identification of new factors associated with unusually successful aging. Aim 3 will launch new directions of investigation through the support of the two Projects associated with this Consortium and collaborative investigations. Outcomes from this Consortium will substantially increase the biologic drivers of unusually successful cognitive aging, with a goal of improving health for all. The factors to be identified will be directly relevant to sustained cognitive health in late life and to the concepts of resilience, resistance and cognitive reserve.
The designation of SuperAger is reserved for individuals at or above the age of 80 who are not just free of cognitive impairment but who also have memory capacity that would be considered average for those 2-3 decades younger1, 2. It appears that SuperAgers may be resistant to the emergence of involutional cellular changes in the brain and/or resilient to their impact on cognition1-8. The importance of identifying biologic factors that drive SuperAging is self-evident. One obstacle has been the relative rarity of this phenotype and the necessity to establish a broad-based recruitment mechanism. In order to address this goal, and in response to RFA-AG-21-015, this proposal aims to establish a multicenter SuperAging Consortium to identify behavioral, health, biologic, genetic, environmental, psychosocial, anatomic, and neuropathologic factors associated with SuperAging. These goals will be achieved through an organizational structure with 3 Cores (Administrative/Biostatistics, Clinical/Imaging, and Biospecimen/Neuropathology), which will enroll 500 SuperAgers and Cognitively Average Elderly Controls through 5 Sites across the United States and Canada. The Consortium will build upon the strengths of exciting discoveries on the anatomy, biology and neuropsychology of SuperAgers identified through the NIA-funded SuperAging Program (R01AG067781), recruit an expanded cohort to consolidate preliminary results, launch new fields of inquiry, and increase the scope of the research with its emphasis on higher enrollment. To this end, the NIA-R01-funded SuperAging Program will join efforts with recruitment Sites in Ann Arbor, Atlanta, Madison, and Southwest Ontario, each of which was selected because of proven leadership and expertise in aging and dementia research. The SuperAging Consortium will leverage existing infrastructure at each of the Sites, including NIA-funded Alzheimer’s Disease Research Centers, the Ontario Brain Institute, and the NIA-R01-funded SuperAging Program. In addition to the creation of a unique and uniform cohort that will be curated for intramural and extramural collaborations, the Consortium will also include two major Research Projects that will address entirely novel aspects of SuperAging through real-time measurements of psychophysiological parameters and the genetic characterization of immune mechanisms. The SuperAging Consortium leadership includes investigators with expertise in successful cognitive aging and dementia, behavioral neurology, neuropsychology, digital biomarkers, neuroimaging,and neuropathology. Below we outline the critical anchor points of the SuperAging Consortium.
