VULNERABILITY AND RESILIENCY IN THE AGING ADULT BRAIN CONNECTOME (AABC)

ABSTRACT FOR OVERVIEW
The Aging Adult Brain Connectome (AABC) leverages the existing infrastructure developed by the Human
Connectome Project for Aging (HCP-A) by obtaining longitudinal follow-up data (neuroimaging, cognitive testing,
and blood) using a standardized protocol from a well characterized cohort of over 1,000 healthy individuals to
generate within-participant brain trajectories for up to 10 years. At initial recruitment, individuals enrolled in the
HCP-A were generally physically and cognitively healthy but over time some will develop preclinical AD or early
cognitive changes due to AD or ADRD. The AABC is comprised of four Projects: Project 1 examine the effects
of stress and allostatic load, including inflammation, during the early adult period. Project 2 examines the effects
of lifestyle behaviors on the trajectory of cognitive and brain changes during the mid adult period. Project 3
examine the effects of menopause transition/vasomotor symptoms during the mid adult period. Project 4 exam-
ine the clinical and neural indicators of resiliency and resistance to AD and ADRD in the later decades of adult-
hood. The AABC also consists of 4 Cores: The Administration Core (AC) will provide essential core and site
leadership to carry out the scientific mission of the AABC. The diversity recruitment and retention unit (DRRU)
will be located within this core and will ensure that the AABC continues to recruit and retain an adequate distri-
bution of races that is currently seen in the US. The Integrated Data Acquisition Core (IDAC) provides expertise
and personnel from each site to acquire high quality neuroimaging, deep phenotyping of non-imaging data, and
biosamples from each site.The Informatics, Data Analysis, and Statistics Core (IDASC) will house project imag-
ing data using the IntraDB database, will perform quality control of raw and analyzed data, will develop and run
cross-sectional and longitudinal pipelines to produce multi-modal imaging data phenotypes for each project, will
provide dimension-reduced summaries, will impute missing data; and will develop and run statistical models for
each project. The IDASC will also be responsible for data sharing with the general public. The Genetics and
Multi-omics Specimens Core (GMSC) will provide genetic information on participants evaluated through the
AABC who have been characterized using a uniform protocol. Multi-omic data and AD biomarker data will be
generated by the GMSC.

Grant Number: 5U19AG073585-04
NIH Institute/Center: NIH
Principal Investigator: Beau Ances