View clinical trials related to Lewy Body Disease.
Filter by:The purpose of this research study is to investigate how the brain, memory, thinking, and motor behavior change both in individuals with movement and/or cognitive disorders, as well as healthy individuals. Researchers will look at measurements of memory, thinking, brain wave and muscle activity, daily functioning, and brain scans to learn more about brain disorders such as Alzheimer disease and Lewy body disease.
The goal of this survey study is to identify environmental, occupational and reproductive health risk factors for Lewy body dementia, which includes Parkinson's disease dementia and dementia with Lewy bodies. Participants will complete a one-time survey online or over the phone that includes questions on environmental, occupational factors they may have been exposed to and on medical history including reproductive health. Researchers will then compare the responses of people with Lewy body dementia and people without Parkinson's or memory/thinking problems to see which factors play a role in Lewy body dementia. Identifying risk factors can guide future treatment efforts and provide more insight to this dementia.
Dementia is the major cause of disability and dependency among older adults worldwide affecting memory, cognitive abilities and behavior, interfering with one's ability to perform daily lives activities. Although age is the strongest known risk factor for the onset of dementia, it is not a natural or inevitable consequence of aging. Dementia not only affects older people, since up to 9% of the cases appear before 65 years. The impact of dementia is highly important in financial terms also in human costs to countries, societies and individuals. Dementia is an umbrella term for several diseases, being Alzheimer's disease (AD) the most common form, contributing to 60-70% of cases. Other major forms include Lewy bodies Dementias (LBDs) and frontotemporal dementia (FTD). The role of the gastrointestinal microbiota in human brain development and function is an area of increasing interest and research. A large number of studies suggest that the gut microbiota can influence the brain, cognition and behavior of the patients, and also modulate brain plasticity, modifying brain chemistry via various mechanisms like neural, immune and endocrine Within these last two years some studies have showed differences in the microbiota of the AD patients from healthy controls. In this sense, increasing number of studies, most of them in animal models, support the notion that probiotics have significant benefit in maintaining homeostasis of the Central Nervous System. And recent studies try to replicate this finding in AD patients with controversial results. The main objective of DEM-BIOTA project is to improve the knowledge of the relationship between microbiota and dementia. DEM-BIOTA will explore the microbiota differences between dementias: AD, LBDs, that includes: Parkinson disease dementia (PDD) and Lewy Body Dementia (LBD) and FTD-behavioral variant, also in Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) to study the progression; in our context (Mediterranean diet and lifestyle) and characterize them in relation to neurocognitive and neuropsychiatric symptoms as well as patient functionality (dependency level). Moreover, the capacity of a probiotic compound in reverting or improving neurocognitive and neuropsychiatric symptoms and patient functionality in a sample of AD patients will be also studied.
The causes of neurodegenerative dementias such as Frontotemporal Dementia, Lewy Body Disease and Alzheimer's disease are still largely unknown. While the contribution of some genetic mutations and polymorphisms is associated with autosomal dominant patterns of inheritance of these dementias, in many cases, the specific causative mutation in these families is not yet identified. Further, in many patients, polygenic risk is thought to give rise to pathophysiologic changes, but which specific genes affect risk are largely yet unknown. By examining genotypes in patients that present to our Cognitive Neurology and Alzheimer's Research Clinic with suspected or confirmed neurodegenerative dementia, or have a history of a familial dementia, we aim to help identify and characterize genetic mutations or polymorphisms that give rise to neurodegenerative diseases.
The goal of the Speech Accessibility Project at the University of Illinois Beckman Institute (https://speechaccessibilityproject.beckman.illinois.edu) is to collect, annotate, and curate a shared database of speech samples from people with atypical speech, and share this data set with researchers at other organizations. This two-year project plans to collect 1,200,000 speech samples from 2,000 people, each of whom will provide 600 samples. In Year 1, the initial focus will be people with Parkinson's. In Year 2, four more etiologies of interest will be recruited: Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), Cerebral Palsy (CP), Down Syndrome (DS), and Stroke. UIUC will build an open-source software infrastructure to collect annotated speech samples and share these data in an appropriately secure fashion with researchers from our partner technology companies (and eventually, other organizations as well) so that they can use these data to improve their automatic speech recognition algorithms. This project promotes diversity, equity, and inclusion by helping technology companies to fully support all types of speech, and it is also more efficient and less burdensome for these specialized patient populations to have one centralized "collector" of speech samples.
Lewy body diseases (LBDs) represents a group of neurodegenerative disorders characterized by the abnormal accumulation of aggregates of α-synuclein protein leading to the formation of Lewy bodies (LB) and Lewy neurites resulting in cell death. LBDs consists of two major clinical entities - Parkinson's disease (PD) and dementia with LB (DLB). Vast majority of patients with LBDs either already have mild cognitive impairment (MCI) at the time of the diagnosis or will develop it during the course of the disease. Language dysfunctions in LBDs patients with MCI are often unrecognized, which are difficult to treat, but even subtle changes might lead to impairment of social and occupational functioning with profound effect on their quality of lives. Current pharmacological or surgical strategies are effective for tackling the motor issues of LBDs with very limited effects on other symptoms such as language dysfunctions. Therefore, non-pharmacological approaches are gaining more attention. One of these non-pharmacological strategies is the use of noninvasive brain stimulation (NIBS) techniques that are able to modulate the brain functions with the effects on human nervous system plasticity. In this proposed project the investigators aim to first describe specific alterations in the language domain in LBDs patients with MCI as compared to healthy controls (HC) and identify the neural underpinnings of these changes using novel combination of advanced multimodal imaging techniques and various analytical methods. Secondly, the investigators aim to use NIBS as a supervised and individualized home-based therapeutical approach to tackle the language dysfunctions.
This study will enroll participants with idiopathic REM sleep behavior disorder (RBD) and healthy controls for the purpose of preparing for a clinical trial of neuroprotective treatments against synucleinopathies.
This research is being done to develop a unique matching process for caregivers of persons living with dementia, such as Alzheimer's disease, Lewy body dementia, frontotemporal degeneration, or other dementia syndromes. Dementia caregivers often assume greater caregiving burden than do non-dementia caregivers, and the caregiving duration tends to be longer. Many caregivers do not have the adequate support they need. Peer-to-peer support has been shown to improve quality of life, more engagement with services, improve caregiver health, and reduce hospitalizations in the person they are caring for. This study will help determine whether caregivers of persons with dementia would find a technology-based caregiver matching program valuable for the purpose of emotional support.
The goal of the study is to develop predictive algorithms and digital biomarkers to capture disease fluctuations in (prodromal) dementia with lewybodies (DLB) patients and to improve treatment, diagnosis and prognosis of the study drug Ambroxol, used in the ANeED study. This project is an additional study to the ANeED study, registered at ClinicalTrials.gov under NCT04588285.
The primary objective of this study is to determine whether treatment with pimavanserin or quetiapine is associated with a greater improvement in psychosis when used in a routine clinical setting to treat hallucinations and/or delusions due to Parkinson's disease (PD) or dementia with Lewy bodies (DLB) - collectively referred to as Lewy body disease (LBD).