BioFINDER-1

BioFINDER-1 is the first Swedish BioFINDER cohort, run by Lund University and Skåne University Hospital to find early and reliable markers of Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease and related disorders. Participants were examined repeatedly with clinical and cognitive testing, CSF and blood sampling, MRI and, in subsets, amyloid and tau PET. The study has stopped enrolling and following participants. A second, independent cohort (BioFINDER-2) started in 2017 and is not covered by this entry.

Composition

The study website gives more than 1,600 participants in four cohorts. Cognitively healthy adults aged 60 or older were sampled at random from the Malmö Diet and Cancer Study (2010 to 2016). People referred to the memory clinics of Skåne University Hospital and Ängelholm Hospital with subjective cognitive decline or mild cognitive impairment (MCI) were enrolled consecutively (2010 to 2015). A dementia cohort of 300 patients covers Alzheimer's disease, vascular dementia, dementia with Lewy bodies, Parkinson's disease dementia and frontotemporal dementia, with 50 more patients with familial Alzheimer's disease. A parkinsonian cohort from the neurology clinic in Lund, recruited from 2008, covers Parkinson's disease, progressive supranuclear palsy and multiple system atrophy. The ClinicalTrials.gov record of the healthy and SCD/MCI arms lists an actual enrollment of 1,150. Vogel et al. (2019) analysed 123 participants with MRI and [18F]flortaucipir PET: 55 controls, 21 amyloid-positive MCI and 47 amyloid-positive Alzheimer's dementia patients.

Acquisition

All cohorts except the parkinsonian one were scanned on one 3 T Siemens Trio: T1-weighted spin echo and MPRAGE, FLAIR, T2*-weighted gradient echo, diffusion tensor and kurtosis imaging, resting-state fMRI, arterial spin labelling and single-voxel MR spectroscopy. The parkinsonian cohort used a 3 T Siemens Skyra with T2-weighted spin echo, FLAIR, SWI, MPRAGE, multi-shell diffusion, resting-state fMRI and ASL. Amyloid PET with [18F]flutemetamol and tau PET with [18F]flortaucipir, repeated every two years, ran on a Philips Gemini TF 16. The methods page also lists F-DOPA PET without any details, so it is not counted here. MRI was repeated every 24 months.

Known limitations

• Images are not publicly released; data are shared only on request for replicating a published article.
• Per-cohort counts on the website read as cohort sizes, and the number of participants with each scan type is not published.
• PET was done only in subsets, and tau PET was added after the study had started.