AMYPAD at AAIC2024

The annual Alzheimer’s Association International Conference (AAIC) 2024, held from July 28th to August 1st in Philadelphia (US) brought together over 14.000 dementia researchers from all areas of practice and career stages to exchange ideas and build connections. This year’s conference featured a comprehensive agenda, including keynote presentations, panel discussions, and posters covering a wide range of topics from basic science to clinical trials and public health.

The AMYPAD project, which was a collaborative initiative funded by the Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI), focused on improving the understanding, diagnosis and management of Alzheimer’s disease through the utilisation of ß-amyloid PET imaging. Despite the project’s funding is over, its contributions continue to influence the field. An educational session at AAIC 2024, titled “Introduction to Amyloid PET Quantification: methodologies, utility, pearls and pitfalls” was organised. This session, chaired by Gill Farrar (AMYPAD leader) and Andrew Stephens, aimed to familiarise the neurology community with the basics of amyloid PET quantification. It was an interactive session, thanks to all speakers and delegates. The session featured four talks:

Renaud La Joie: “Introduction to Centiloids”
Lyduine E. Collij: “Centiloid thresholds: what do they reflect?”
David N. Soleimani-Meigooni: “Clinician Experience with Amyloid PET Visual Read and Centiloid Quantitation”
Ariane Bollack: “The Centiloid scale: guidance on clinical context of use from the AMYPAD Consortium”

In addition, Luigi Lorenzini presented an oral talk entitled “Differential network-based propagation of cortical thinning in atrophy subtypes in non-demented individuals” showing that atrophy subtypes can already be detected in people without dementia and that progression of atrophy within subtypes is determined by network-based mechanisms. In this study, a total of 1323 individuals, including 1094 amyloid-negative, and 229 amyloid-positive participants from the AMYPAD Prognostic and Natural History Study (PNHS) were included.

Attendees were also invited to explore the posters (more than 4.500) including:

Emma Luckett: “Associations between AD polygenic risk scores and global amyloid deposition in the European AMYPAD consortium”
Luigi Lorenzini “Image-derived phenotypes in the AMYPAD Prognostic and Natural History Study” (on behalf of Leo Pieperhoff)
Ariane Bollack: “The Centiloid scale: guidance on clinical context of use from the AMYPAD Consortium”
Emma Luckett: “From AMYPAD to Euro-PAD: creating a multi-cohort preclinical database to model onset of Alzheimer’s disease” (on behalf of David Garcia)

It has been an amazing week at AAIC24 with inspiring talks and engaging discussions and we hope to see you again next year in Toronto for #AAIC25. Mark the dates July 27-31!