THE INTEGRATED DATA ACQUISITION CORE (IDAC)

ABSTRACT FOR IDAC The Integrated Data Acquisition Core (IDAC) of the Aging Adult Brain Connectome (AABC) project will acquire high-quality longitudinal data in the lifespan HCP-Aging (HCP-A) cohort, with the goal of studying vulnerability and resilience in aging. The data will support the discovery of inflection points in aging and how those relate to

established biomarkers of risk/resilience for Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) or other AD related dementias (ADRD). We will use the HCP acquisition model and build off the multi-site consortium of the HCP-A study, which has acquired neuroimaging and extensive non-imaging phenotyping data from a large cross-sectional and

longitudinal sample of typical aging adults. The focus on vulnerability and resilience in the AABC project will potentiate the HCP-A with an unparalleled dataset with up to 10-years of longitudinal data per individual, sampled across the full aging spectrum for 1000 participants. This comprehensive dataset has great potential to uncover

early markers and behaviors that are associated with an increased risk for AD/ADRD. To accomplish this goal, the IDAC will extend and oversee multi-site longitudinal collection of neuroimaging data (at 3T), behavioral, neurocognitive, lifestyle and other non-imaging data, and biological samples from previous participants in the

HCP-A. The continuity of this dataset with HCP-A will allow for rich longitudinal characterization of major factors relevant to general health and brain aging, including brain morphometry, structural and functional connectomics, cognition, memory, genetic status, systemic health, lifestyle, and hormonal status. Pertinent to the goals of the

Projects we will collect new data on stress, social/community engagement, and adversity, with enhanced recruitment of under-represented groups. Objective measures of sleep quality and physical activity using state- of-the-art wearable technology are also added. Finally, high field (7T) magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS)

acquisitions (on clinical scanners) will be added at two sites, to support innovative Project hypotheses regarding neurochemical changes across the lifespan and how they might correlate with other AD/ADRD risk factors. Our specific aims are to: (1) implement and oversee harmonized 3T MRI data acquisition across the four sites at two

longitudinal time points (~2-years apart) in ‘typically-aging’ individuals aged 36-100+ years old, representative of sex, race and ethnicity, and socio-economic status of the US; (2) implement and oversee 7T MRS for neurochemical profiling; and (3) ensure proper collection of neuropsychological, behavioral, physiological and

lifestyle data, and biological samples across the four sites. The IDAC will work closely with all other aspects of the AABC – including its four interconnected Projects, the Administrative Core, the Informatics, Data Analysis, and Statistics Core (IDASC), and the Genetics and Multi-omics Specimens Core (GMSC) – to ensure consistent

data acquisition across time and sites, thus reducing the impact of protocol drift and site-specific variance. Altogether, the IDAC will provide the foundational data for the Projects’ investigations of vulnerability and resilience in the AABC and how the lifespan trajectory of various measures relates to risk factors for AD/ADRD.