Prospective Imaging Study of Aging (PISA)
PISA - one of the most extensive cohort studies in the world
Dementia has recently been confirmed as the leading cause of death in Australia, with over 420,000 Australians living with dementia. Due to our ageing population, this will increase to 800,000 by 2050. We know that the disease process for dementia begins up to twenty years before the onset of clinical symptoms.
In the PISA study, our team are studying research participants from middle age so we can understand the causes of dementia and the earliest signs of the disease. Early detection and diagnosis is important for newly developed drugs and interventions, ensuring individuals receive the most benefit as soon as possible.
PISA has become one of the most extensive cohort studies in the world, focusing on early-stage dementia with recruitment from middle age. Our data includes genetics, self-report surveys, medical record linkage and online cognitive testing from over 5,000 research participants. We have also collected brain imaging, neuropsychology and blood samples from over 500 research participants.
Mean loading of the in person (top) and online (bottom) latent variable onto the 127 brain sulci averaged across left and right hemisphere.
Our recent PISA study showed that Online Cognitive testing performs well at predicting age-related brain changes. Online cognitive testing platforms have the potential to serve as valuable tools in research and clinical practice. They are more accessible and less expensive than in-person neuropsychological tests and can be used in both research and for screening participants for Alzheimer’s disease treatments, interventions, and clinical trial recruitment.
In a study co-led by Associate Professor Michelle Lupton (QIMR Berghofer) and Professor Michael Breakspear (University of Newcastle), we compared data from our PISA online cognitive testing platform (Creyos) with our in-person cognitive assessment to study the ability of each test to predict age-related brain changes.
We tested the strength of the association of cognitive data from 141 healthy mid-life and older adults with structural MRI brain measures that change with ageing and dementia. Our online test, which can be completed at home unsupervised in around 30 minutes, performed well compared to in-person neuropsychological testing. This showed that cost-effective online cognitive testing could lead to improved access to screening for neurodegenerative disease.
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