The mission of The Battle for the Brain’s Lip Sync Competition is to raise public awareness, change the stigma associated with dementia and fund research in support of the NIH goal to prevent and effectively treat Alzheimer’s by 2025.

Battle for the Brain proceeds are donated to Emory’s Goizueta Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center and support unrestricted research relating to digital and traditional biomarkers so that we can detect and treat Alzheimer’s and dementia in their earliest stages.

Early DIAGNOSTICs RELATING TO ALZHEIMER’S AND DEMENTIA - SPECIFICALLY BLOOD BASED BIOMARKER TESTS THAT WILL EASILY SCREEN AND HELP FACILITATE EFFECTIVE TREATMENT FOR ASYMPTOMATIC OR PRE-SYMPTOMATIC PEOPLE BEFORE COGNITIVE DECLINE BEGINS

Now that prospects for effective treatments for Alzheimer’s and dementia are on the horizon, it is even more urgent to have effective tools to identify people who will need intervention as early as possible.

Currently, the only two tests that detect Amyloid Beta Plaques and Tau Tangles, the two cardinal pathologies of Alzheimer’s, are PET scans and Lumbar Punctures; neither are ideal. PET scans are expensive, time-consuming and involve radiation exposure. Lumbar Punctures are invasive, time-consuming, and not widely available. Blood tests, on the other hand, are easy, accessible, fast, and inexpensive.

The first early diagnostic blood test, PrecivityAD ™, which is a reference test based on the presence of amyloid-beta, shows that it is possible to develop blood biomarker tests for the presence of amyloid-beta in the brain. These biomarkers, along with others that may provide new or additional information about the risk of developing Alzheimer's disease, are urgently needed for different pathological processes that can better stratify risk for the development of Alzheimer's disease and are more related to cognitive health and decline than amyloid-beta.

“Daughters Against Alzheimer's (DAA) support has enabled the recent discovery of an exciting new set of proteins in blood that may provide insight into whether a person with amyloid-beta in the brain will develop cognitive symptoms during their lifetime. These proteins are found in the space outside of brain cells and interact with the amyloid-beta protein to potentially mediate the toxic effects of amyloid-beta plaques in the brain. Research support provided by DAA is now allowing researchers at Emory to investigate whether these novel proteins could be used to better assess risk of future cognitive problems through a simple blood test taken during a routine primary care visit.

Treatments for Alzheimer’s and dementia will be most effective if we can detect the different pathologies of the disease before cognitive problems occur. Blood-based biomarkers will change the way we diagnose and treat Alzheimer’s and dementia, allowing us to detect problems early and prevent future cognitive decline.”

-Erik Johnson, MD, PhD, Blood based biomarkers for Alzheimer’s Disease, Emory’s Goizueta Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center