# Novel Multimodal Assessment of Practical Judgment Across the Alzheimer's Continuum: Toward a Better Understanding of how to Predict Risk in the Elderly

> **NIH NIH R15** · BROOKLYN COLLEGE · 2020 · $481,103

## Abstract

ABSTRACT
 By the year 2050, as many as 16 million individuals in the U.S. will express symptoms of Alzheimer’s
disease (AD). A recent White House Conference on Aging emphasized the need to improve detection of
diminished capacity as a means to improve personal safety and prevent financial exploitation and abuse.
Realizing this directive requires well-validated methods for assessing judgment in everyday life. Judgment is
an important cognitive ability critical to real-world adaptive functioning across age ranges, but particularly for
older adults. Further work must address how to identify individuals who are at risk for exploitation, when and
how judgment first becomes compromised, and how to use objective cognitive tests to measure practical
judgment that predicts real-world outcomes. Despite the substantial need for reliable and valid assessment of
judgment in older adults, empirical studies have not addressed these questions in a wholistic manner.
Additionally, no formal studies have assessed judgment in direct relation to underlying structural and functional
brain networks or to apolipoprotein E (APOE) allele status, an important genetic risk factor for AD. Given these
critical gaps in the literature, we will build upon our previous work by recruiting 96 older adults who include the
cognitively unimpaired and those with subjective cognitive decline, mild cognitive impairment, and Alzheimer’s
clinical syndrome. Our goals include determination of optimal assessment methods that elucidate judgment
ability during the critical, early period of cognitive decline when functional status may become compromised in
a possibly hazardous way and employment of resting state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rs-fMRI)
and diffusion tensor imaging to measure the relationship between practical judgment and structural and
functional brain networks. We will evaluate how changes in neural networks along the AD continuum track with
differences in judgment, while also assessing the synergistic interactions of APOE allele status. Our team is
well-positioned to tackle these goals, with a strong history of research in the fields of neurocognitive aging and
the assessment of judgment, excellent institutional support, and access to state-of-the-art neuroimaging. From
a public health perspective, early identification of risk of exploitation due to poor judgment is imperative.
Elucidation of the changes associated with judgment ability, utilizing multimodal techniques, will directly
enhance clinical diagnosis, patient care, and prediction of at-risk populations. Importantly, this R15 project
provides excellent opportunities for underrepresented undergraduate students to contribute meaningfully to our
innovative program of cognitive aging research. It will also enhance our research and educational infrastructure
by affording access to data derived from clinical populations and state-of-the-art neuroimaging methods
unavailable at Brooklyn College.

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 9881130
- **Project number:** 1R15AG066039-01
- **Recipient organization:** BROOKLYN COLLEGE
- **Principal Investigator:** Laura A. Rabin
- **Activity code:** R15 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2020
- **Award amount:** $481,103
- **Award type:** 1
- **Project period:** 2020-02-01 → 2024-07-31

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/9881130

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 9881130, Novel Multimodal Assessment of Practical Judgment Across the Alzheimer's Continuum: Toward a Better Understanding of how to Predict Risk in the Elderly (1R15AG066039-01). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-28 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/9881130. Licensed CC0.

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