Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is a common neurodegenerative disease of older age with extensive heterogeneity in its onset and course. Despite over three decades of work, there are currently no treatments for AD, and its pathobiology remains incompletely understood. Thus, new insights into the events leading to AD in the older brain are needed, and new forms of data from the target organ will help to support unbiased assessment that will yield such insights. The samples that we have profiled come from two prospective studies of aging-The Religious order Study (ROS) and the Memory and Aging Project (MAP)-that recruit older individuals without known dementia and include (1) detailed cognitive, neuroimaging and other ante-mortem phenotyping and (2) an autopsy at the time of death that includes a structured neuropathologic examination. Both studies are run by the same team of investigators at the Rush Alzheimer Disease Center (RADC), and they were designed to be used in joint analyses to maximize sample size. ROS subjects live in communities distributed throughout the U.S., while MAP subjects live in communities in the Chicago metropolitan area. We
