Our StoP-AD Centre

The Centre for Studies on the Prevention of Alzheimer's Disease (StoP-AD) was created in 2010, at Douglas Mental Health University Institute Research Centre, under the direction of Dr. John C.S. Breitner, MD, MPH, Dr. Judes Poirier, PhD, and Dr. Pierre Etienne, MD. The current director of the program is Dr. Sylvia Villeneuve, PhD with Dr. Judes Poirier, PhD as assistant director.

The main mission of the StoP-AD Centre is the pursuit of innovative and multidimensional studies and interventions on the "preclinical", or asymptomatic phase of Alzheimer's disease (AD) in the hopes of delaying the onset of the disease. According to the Alzheimer Society of Canada, delaying the onset of dementia by one year could prevent around 500 000 cases of dementia in Canada by the year 2050.

The primary resource of the StoP-AD Centre is the PREVENT-AD observational cohort (Pre-symptomatic Evaluation of Experimental or Novel Treatments for AD). This group is made up of cognitively healthy individuals with a family history of Alzheimer's type dementia, be it from their parents or siblings. These "at risk" participants benefit from a detailed follow-up on an annual basis, which includes a battery of multimodal and longitudinal measures of a diverse array of disease indicators, such as:

To this day, two clinical trials and a non-pharmaceutical intervention with the potential to delay the onset of Alzheimer's disease have been evaluated.

Data management at the StoP-AD Centre is carried out through LORIS , which provides the technical infrastructure to manage the acquisition, storing, and conservation of data in order to facilitate data sharing with the greater research community.