ANMerge: A Comprehensive and Accessible Alzheimer's Disease Patient-Level Dataset

J Alzheimers Dis. 2021;79(1):423-431. doi: 10.3233/JAD-200948.

Abstract

Background: Accessible datasets are of fundamental importance to the advancement of Alzheimer's disease (AD) research. The AddNeuroMed consortium conducted a longitudinal observational cohort study with the aim to discover AD biomarkers. During this study, a broad selection of data modalities was measured including clinical assessments, magnetic resonance imaging, genotyping, transcriptomic profiling, and blood plasma proteomics. Some of the collected data were shared with third-party researchers. However, this data was incomplete, erroneous, and lacking in interoperability.

Objective: To provide the research community with an accessible, multimodal, patient-level AD cohort dataset.

Methods: We systematically addressed several limitations of the originally shared resources and provided additional unreleased data to enhance the dataset.

Results: In this work, we publish and describe ANMerge, a new version of the AddNeuroMed dataset. ANMerge includes multimodal data from 1,702 study participants and is accessible to the research community via a centralized portal.

Conclusion: ANMerge is an information rich patient-level data resource that can serve as a discovery and validation cohort for data-driven AD research, such as, for example, machine learning and artificial intelligence approaches.

Keywords: AddNeuroMed; Alzheimer’s disease; biomarkers; cohort analysis; cohort studies; data-driven science; dataset; dementia; genome wide association studies; magnetic resonance imaging; multimodal.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Aged
  • Aged, 80 and over
  • Alzheimer Disease / diagnostic imaging
  • Alzheimer Disease / genetics
  • Alzheimer Disease / metabolism
  • Alzheimer Disease / physiopathology*
  • Cohort Studies
  • Datasets as Topic*
  • Female
  • Gene Expression Profiling
  • Genotype
  • Humans
  • Magnetic Resonance Imaging
  • Male
  • Proteomics