Hope this newsletter finds you well post-COVID and you can enjoy meeting with friends and colleagues again. Sadly, I had to miss the AD/PD conference myself due to COVID, but heard very positive feedback from those attending. Further opportunities for interactions will undoubtedly occur in upcoming events such as AAIC in San Diego in the summer where AMYPAD will be well presented.

It is hard to believe that after almost six years we are nearing  completion of the AMYPAD Prognostic and Natural History Study (PNHS) study. Recruitment has been halted and final scans are being performed, with sites being closed progressively. Due to the contribution of many parent cohorts and historical scans available, we have collected >2500 scans in the study, which is a huge achievement. We are also finalising the PET analysis and integration of data across cohorts, with progressively more data becoming available through the ADDI portal. You will read more about this in this newsletter.

In the coming months you will hear more about ongoing analyses to address the primary goals of the PNHS and several secondary goals that are being explored in WP4, with hopefully more definitive results being presented at our final General Assembly meeting in Amsterdam on 22/23 September (save the date!). Hope you all will contribute to those activities and be inspired to perform subsequent studies using our very rich database and advertise its use to your colleagues.

Of course, the work of AMYPAD does not stop here and for many analyses, the real work only starts now. This is also true for outside requests for access to data which are coming in and we are setting up procedures for that, as well as a governance structure on how to curate and hopefully grow the data – something that is done in collaboration with EPAD.

Wishing you all the best personally and lots of inspiration for PNHS analysis plans and AAIC.

You can download the newsletter here.

Frederik Barkhof
AMYPAD Coordinator