UNM Center gets NIH grant
May 23—Alzeimer's Disease research at the University of New Mexico got a shot in the arm.
The UNM Center for Memory & Aging received a five-year, $21.7 million National Institutes of Health grant. UNM will use the grant to fund its Alzeimer's Disease Research Center.
The grant will allow the center to continue its efforts after it previously received a three-year, exploratory grant which allowed UNM to become one of 35 research universities in the ADRC network.
The network was created in 1984 to provide operational support across the U.S. to better investigate the underlying causes of Alzheimer's disease.
"The whole point was that no one center was going to get enough information, so they built these centers for collecting behavioral data, imaging data, cerebrospinal fluid and blood data and pathology data into national repositories," Dr. Hary Rosenberg said in a news release. "These centers are a major resource for large studies into the cause and prevention of cognitive decline and loss."
Researchers view dementia as a collection of disorders with different causes. Alzheimer's disease is the most common form of dementia.
"We now realize that most people have a combination of Alzheimer's and vascular dementia," Rosenberg said. "When you have both vascular disease and amyloid protein, the inflammation is much worse. That disrupts the blood vessels, leading to more cascading events."
