ANMerge
ANMerge: curated release of the AddNeuroMed Alzheimer's disease cohort
Curated release of the European AddNeuroMed cohort with the DCR and ART cohorts: 1,702 participants (healthy, MCI, Alzheimer's disease) with clinical data, genotypes, blood transcriptomics and proteomics, and 1.5 T T1w MRI with FreeSurfer features for 453 participants.
Overview
ANMerge is a cleaned and extended version of the data from AddNeuroMed, a European longitudinal cohort study started in 2005 under the EU InnoMed programme to find biomarkers of Alzheimer's disease progression. Researchers at Fraunhofer SCAI and the University of Oxford reorganised the earlier Synapse release, unified the participant identifiers across data types, added a months-in-study time scale, corrected entry errors and added clinical data that had not been shared before. The result is hosted on Synapse and is meant as a discovery or validation cohort next to ADNI.
Composition
The release covers 1,702 participants: 773 from AddNeuroMed itself, 665 from the Maudsley BRC Dementia Case Registry (DCR) and 264 from the Alzheimer's Research Trust UK cohort (ART). At baseline, 793 were cognitively healthy, 397 had mild cognitive impairment and 512 had Alzheimer's disease, with a mean age of 76.4 years. Clinical data exist for everyone; MRI features exist for 453 participants, proteomics for 680, blood gene expression for 709 and genotypes for 1,014. The tables report 4,585 participant visits, with follow-up of up to 12 years.
Acquisition
AddNeuroMed recruited at six centres in Finland, Greece, the United Kingdom, Poland, Italy and France. Structural T1-weighted MRI was acquired at 1.5 T at months 0, 3 and 12 with a protocol aligned to ADNI. ANMerge provides FreeSurfer 5.3 and 6.0 volumes and cortical thickness. The raw T1-weighted images are shared in NIfTI format in the earlier AddNeuroMed folder under the same access terms; the folder notes that scanners and protocols changed during the study.
Annotations
There are no image annotations. Labels are clinical diagnoses (DSM-IV and NINCDS-ADRDA for Alzheimer's disease, Petersen criteria for MCI) and cognitive scores such as MMSE, CDR and ADAS-Cog.
Known limitations
No amyloid PET or cerebrospinal fluid markers were collected, so amyloid status is unknown. Many participants miss one or more data types, and DCR participants were included even when only clinical data exist. Genotype and expression data come in separate batches and need batch correction. Study protocols are only partly documented.
Cohort
Aggregate numbers from the sources below. Bars are relative to the 1,702 subjects.
Age
mean 76.4± 6.9No age bins reported.
Contrast / sequence
subjects, values can overlap
- T1-weighted 453 27%
Condition
subjects, values can overlap
- Healthy control 793 47%
- Alzheimer's disease 512 30%
- Mild cognitive impairment 397 23%
Field strength
subjects
- 1.5 T 453 27%
License and access
Our reading of the license, not legal advice. Before you use the data, read the original license and confirm that your use is allowed. We take no responsibility for how you use a dataset. Full disclaimer
A research proposal is reviewed and approved
AddNeuroMed Data Use Certificate and Synapse access terms
Access after a reviewed request on Synapse: a Data Use Certificate signed by an institutional official, a short research proposal with data security measures, and confirmation of ethics review. Publications must carry the AddNeuroMed acknowledgement. The certificate itself is not public, so most permissions are unknown.
What you can do
- Not stated
- Not stated
- Train ML models Not stated
- Create derived data Not stated
- Conditional
What you can share
- No
- Share derived data Not stated
- Share trained models Not stated
What you must do
- Yes
- Not stated
- Yes
- Yes
- Not stated
- Not stated
- Not stated
- Not stated
Limits
- Not stated
- Not stated
Commercial license: Not stated
Citation
Birkenbihl C, Westwood S, Shi L, Nevado-Holgado A, Westman E, Lovestone S, AddNeuroMed Consortium, Hofmann-Apitius M. ANMerge: A Comprehensive and Accessible Alzheimer's Disease Patient-Level Dataset. Journal of Alzheimer's Disease 79(1):423-431 (2021). doi:10.3233/JAD-200948
All numbers
Every number on this page, as stored in stats.csv, with its source.
| Measure | Breakdown | Value | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Subjects | total 773 AddNeuroMed, 665 DCR and 264 ART participants | 1,702 | birkenbihl2021 Table 1 |
| Subjects | condition=healthy diagnosis at baseline | 793 | birkenbihl2021 Table 1 |
| Subjects | condition=mci diagnosis at baseline | 397 | birkenbihl2021 Table 1 |
| Subjects | condition=alzheimers diagnosis at baseline | 512 | birkenbihl2021 Table 1 |
| Subjects | contrast=T1w participants with at least one MRI variable (FreeSurfer features) in ANMerge | 453 | birkenbihl2021 Table 2 |
| Subjects | field_strength=1.5 1.5 T T1-weighted MRI at months 0, 3 and 12 | 453 | birkenbihl2021 Table 2; Methods, Magnetic resonance imaging |
| Mean age | total at baseline | 76.4 | birkenbihl2021 Table 1 |
| Age SD | total at baseline | 6.9 | birkenbihl2021 Table 1 |
| Mean age | condition=healthy at baseline | 74.5 | birkenbihl2021 Table 1 |
| Age SD | condition=healthy at baseline | 6.4 | birkenbihl2021 Table 1 |
| Mean age | condition=mci at baseline | 76 | birkenbihl2021 Table 1 |
| Age SD | condition=mci at baseline | 6.5 | birkenbihl2021 Table 1 |
| Mean age | condition=alzheimers at baseline | 78.6 | birkenbihl2021 Table 1 |
| Age SD | condition=alzheimers at baseline | 7.2 | birkenbihl2021 Table 1 |
Sources
The keys used in the table above.
- birkenbihl2021 Birkenbihl et al. 2021, Journal of Alzheimer's Disease paper
- synapse-addneuromed-mri AddNeuroMed MRI folder on Synapse, folder description website