Center to Accelerate Population Research in Alzheimer's (CAPRA)

Project Abstract (Overall)
The landscape for population impact of Alzheimer’s Disease and related dementias (AD/ADRD) has fundamentally changed over the past decade. Investments in research made through the National Alzheimer’s Project Act (NAPA) in 2011 have unlocked new possibilities for diagnosis and treatment. The investments have also broadened our understanding of AD/ADRD as a global population challenge, revealed the disproportionate burden of disease across population subgroups, and the financial risks to individuals, families, and governments. NAPA’s goal is to reduce the burden of AD/ADRD, not just for persons with dementia, but also for society at large, including the social, economic, and health system effects. While new disease-specific treatments may fundamentally alter the potential for reducing the impact of AD/ADRD on the population, there remain large gaps in our knowledge about how policymakers and healthcare organizations can best prepare for and respond to the broad population effects of AD/ADRD.
The Center to Accelerate Population Research in Alzheimer’s (CAPRA) at the University of Michigan, initially funded in 2019, supports science that informs government and healthcare organization actions to address the negative impacts of dementia on the health and financial well-being of individuals and the population. Our focus on public policy and healthcare for persons with dementia falls into four inter-related themes; 1) health policy and healthcare system impact on acute and long-term care outcomes, 2) diffusion of new diagnostics and drugs into practice, 3) heterogeneity in disease risk, care access, and outcomes across populations, and 4) innovative applications of population data.
The overarching goal for CAPRA is to serve as a national resource to enable and expand high quality research by future leaders in the study of healthcare delivery, economics, and public health to reduce the burden of AD/ADRD locally, nationally, and internationally. With many more people funded in AD/ADRD, in this renewal application CAPRA will strive to be a driving force behind investigators who develop rigorous and impactful AD/ADRD research across the multiple disciplines necessary to address the complexity posed by AD/ADRD and the greater risks across population subgroups. To drive this research CAPRA will: identify and support new investigators; create collaborative networks of scientists across institutions and disciplines; study dementia trends and develop new methods and data resources that are costly and time-consuming to develop on one’s own; and, most importantly, disseminate the tools and the research insights generated by the CAPRA community of scientists broadly.

Grant Number: 2P30AG066582-06
NIH Institute/Center: NIH
Principal Investigator: Julie Bynum