Page 17 - MaquetaFundCIEN-2019-ENG

1. Profile and presentation
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1.5
Future oulook
At the end of 2013, the Vallecas Project concluded the recruitment phase, finally constituting a cohort of 1,213 volunteers of both sexes aged between 69 and 85 years. Once included in the study, an annual follow-up of the volunteers was carried out in order to assess the evolutionary profile of all the participants, spe- cifically identifying those people who have developed mild cognitive impairment, incipient dementia or advanced dementia. The objective of the Vallecas Project is mainly focused on the early detection of Alzheimer’s disease with a multidisci- plinary approach, based on the conjunction of sociodemographic, clinical, neu- rological, neuropsychological, genetic, biochemical and neuroimaging data.
Additionally, the Vallecas Project cohort represents a unique and invaluable re- search resource that allows addressing complementary research objectives such as the study of the factors involved in healthy aging, the analysis of the etiopathogenic mechanisms of Alzheimer’s disease or the definition of new ther- apeutic targets. In this regard, the Vallecas Project cohort is one of the Founda- tion’s main resources for establishing national and international collaborations. As a result of these collaborations, work of high impact and international rele- vance is already being carried out.
Likewise, the availability of multidisciplinary data and a repository of longitudi- nal biological samples that cover all stages of the evolution of the disease from normality to dementia constitutes a future value that transcends the present usefulness of the Vallecas Project. This scope is increased when combined with the BT-CIEN biobank structure that guarantees the availability of data and sam- ples for the scientific community once the Vallecas Project reaches the end of its follow-up phase, thus providing a high added value to the effort carried out in recent years within the Vallecas project.
Due to the fact that during the years of development of the project there has been a significant attrition of the cohort of volunteers for various reasons (loss