"We are pleased that the NIA is supporting our efforts to understand and combat this insidious disease," said Carl Cotman, principal investigator of the grant and director of the UCI Institute for Brain Aging and Dementia, which administers the ADRC. "The new funding will allow us to push ahead with our work on the mechanisms of brain aging and Alzheimer's disease."
Alzheimer's affects almost 5 million Americans and is the most common form of dementia in the United States. Marked by the accumulation of lesions in the brain, Alzheimer's is the third leading cause of death in the country, trailing cancer and coronary heart disease.
"The NIA Alzheimer's Disease Centers Program is very competitive and when currently funded centers come up for renewal, there are many other applicants seeking to displace them," said Creighton H. Phelps, director of the Alzheimer's Disease Centers Program at NIA. "Applicants are judged on past research performance and future promise to contribute to the advancement of science related to Alzheimer's disease. Only the best organized and productive centers, such as UCI's center, survive these competitions."
Over the next five years, the new NIA grant will support three key research projects. One project will seek to determine which age-related changes in the brain underlie the decline in episodic memory that accompanies aging. The second project will test the hypothesis that defects in the mitochondria, the "energy factories" of cells, play a major r
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Contact: Iqbal Pittalwala
iqbal@uci.edu
949-824-3969
University of California - Irvine
23-May-2005