Ontario Neurodegenerative Disease Research Initiative (ONDRI)
Brain-Eye Amyloid Imaging study (BEAM)
ONDRI is a highly collaborative research initiative. It tackles the complexity of dementia by studying multiple neurodegenerative diseases at once. ONDRI’s four aims represent areas of research focused on collecting, analyzing, and validating data from people living with diseases that can cause cognitive impairment and dementia. ONDRI takes a unique multi-dimensional approach to its research, with a cross-disease, cross-platform perspective that allows new types of questions to be asked. The goal is to advance dementia research and ultimately improve diagnosis, prognosis, care, and outcomes for people living with neurodegenerative diseases and stroke, and for those who support them.
ONDRI was a 5-year province-wide effort by 10 different recruitment sites to acquire deep-phenotyping and longitudinal assessments on five main neurodegenerative cohorts including AD/MCI, Cerebrovascular Disease (CVD), Parkinson’s Disease (PD), Frontotemporal Dementia (FTD), and ALS. This study is unique in that identical comprehensive assessments would be performed on each cohort to enable a deeper understanding of the similarities and differences between them, including advanced MRI, extremely detailed clinical and neuropsychological assessment, gait and balance, genetics, eye-tracking, and blood-based biomarkers. Three or more annual assessments were performed to assess longitudinal change in more than 520 participants.
BEAM is cross-sectional study designed to assess the relationships between measures of cerebrovascular health as determined from in-vivo eye imaging (eg. optical coherence tomography), and brain health using advanced MRI techniques, and brain amyloid imaging with Positron Emission Tomography. Several cohorts including AD/MCI, PD, SVD (small vessel disease, aka, cerebrovascular disease), VCI (vascular cognitive impairment), and Lewy body disease (LBD), and cognitively normal individuals are being recruited from across Ontario and imaged at several Toronto research centres. The BEAM study was designed to be a companion study to ONDRI and also includes identical comprehensive assessments to ONDRI, including detailed clinical and neuropsychological assessment, eye-tracking, genetics/genomics, and gait and balance. The cognitively normal healthy controls have also been shared with ONDRI and are serving as a normal control population for that study.
The BEAM study is investigating whether measurements of the eye can be used with other tests to detect dementia earlier. By comparing the results of non-invasive tests similar to those done in an eye doctor’s office with established tests of cognition, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and a positron emission tomography (PET) scan, researchers can look for links between changes in parts of the eye in dementia. PET scans can detect amyloid that has deposited in the brain, which is a hallmark of Alzheimer’s disease.
Study Type: Health Canada Regulated Trial, Observational & cross sectional in nature; Sponsor - Sunnybrook Research Institute