[Advanced] Your Brain on File (1)

Researchers aim to build a database of brain health

Your online test results aren't pass-fail. You aren't graded. But your scores give valuable snapshots of your mental flexibility and memory, contributing to what UC San Francisco researchers hope will some day be a vast archive of information about brain health -- and the first neuroscience project to use the Internet on such a scale to advance research.

By volunteering -- repeatedly over time -- participants join a pool of research subjects in the new Brain Health Registry, opened Tuesday, for studies on brain diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's, as well as depression, post-traumatic stress disorder and other neurological ailments.

You won't learn your own scores; that disclosure could influence your future performance or trigger unwarranted "freak outs," said UCSF's Dr. Michael Weiner, founder of the registry and lead investigator of the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative, the world's largest observational study of the disease.

Rather, you will help speed up research by helping cut the time and cost of conducting clinical trials.

The trouble with trials
One-third of the cost of running trial studies is patient recruitment -- and many trials fail, or are delayed, due to problems getting enough of the right volunteers. The traditional approach to finding participants is low-tech, such as posting notices on bulletin boards or buying ads in newspapers. And it's time-consuming to determine if someone is even eligible to volunteer, then document their family and personal medical history. Think clipboards, pens and paper.

Frustrated by how much effort would be required to launch a giant Bay Area-based study in Alzheimer's prevention, "a light bulb went off in my mind," said Weiner.

Why not use the Internet as a way to enroll in trials," he said, "where volunteers take a few minutes to take some online neuropsychological test to measure brain performance?"

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