Project acronym: BioCog

Project full title: "Biomarker Development for Postoperative
Cognitive Impairment in the Elderly"

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BioCog project


brain

Cognitive impairment
Cognitive impairment is increasingly prevalent in our aging society. Impaired cognitive capacity can be the consequence of age-associated primary brain disorders (depression, Alzheimer’s dementia (AD), cerebrovascular disease etc.) and/or secondary brain disorders due to medical conditions such as diabetes, inflammation or treatment interventions and life style factors.
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arrow Postoperative Cognitive Impairment

BioCog, a FP7 funded project, will establish valid biomarkers panels for risk and clinical outcome prediction of POD/POCD (Postoperative Delirium/Postoperative Cognitive Dysfunction). The study population will be 1200 patients, aged 65 to 80 undergoing major elective surgery.

The expected project outcomes are:

1) to support clinical decision-making in patient care, e.g. to balance the individual POD/POCD risk against the expected overall clinical outcome of a surgical intervention.

2) to allow the design of more sophisticated and hypothesis-driven clinical studies and drug trials (translational research) in the future.

Multiple risk factors are associated with POD/POCD. Research aiming to understand the diverse pathomechanisms of POD/POCD requires identification of a range of clinically valid biomarkers. Description of some of these is limited at present. Integration of neuroimaging biomarkers, which provide direct information on brain structure/function with high sensitivity, combined with complementary knowledge on specific pathomechanisms from molecular biomarkers (cholinergic, inflammatory, metabolic) as obtained from body fluids (plasma, cerebrospinal fluid (CSF)) is expected to allow accurate patient stratification (subtyping). This complex and multidisciplinary approach is the basis of BioCog.

arrow The health-economic impact of biomarker-guided strategy will be also analysed

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