Contact person: Dr Jane Alty or Dr Katharine Salmon
Project Summary:
The ISLAND Clinic is the Tasmanian diagnostic and research clinic for Dementia and Cognition, which operates under the Wicking Dementia Centre programs. It is one of a suite of specialist clinics that are affiliated with the Australian Dementia Network (ADNet), an initiative funded by the National Health and Medical Research Council (2019-2023) that seeks to build a national Clinical Quality Registry, harmonise operations and data collection through cognitive clinics, and build capacity for clinical trials in dementia nationally.
The ISLAND Clinic’s primary aim is to provide timely and expert interdisciplinary assessment, diagnosis, support, referral and information for Tasmanians with cognitive symptoms referred by their GP and to build up a research database to enable better understanding of cognitive impairment and dementia. To achieve this, The ISLAND Clinic will use a person-centred process involving an interdisciplinary team of clinicians including a neurologist, geriatricians, neuropsychologist, GP, neuro-radiologist, nursing and allied health professionals. The ISLAND Clinic will offer a ‘one-stop’ bulk-billed diagnostic clinic with all assessments and diagnostic discussion on one day (except for the MRI brain scan that will typically be arranged about a week before clinic).
All clients will be requested to sign a consent form to enable their medical information to be stored securely on the Wicking database – for the purposes of ongoing clinical care and research. Participants are also invited to provide blood samples and undertake additional research tests to help develop new biomarkers of dementia risk. Our participation in ADNeT requires a minimum dataset of anonymised data that will be collected for this purpose and passed onto the national study coordinators.
Objectives:
This project aims to:
- provide a gold-standard clinical assessment and diagnosis for people with cognitive symptoms that have persisted for at least 3 months
- Contribute data to ADNeT Clinical Quality Registry
- Develop new biomarkers of dementia risk using data from clinical assessments, questionnaires, blood samples, gait analysis and MRI brain scans
Research Team:
- Dr Jane Alty
- Dr Katharine Salmon
- Dr Scott McDonald
- Dr Kate Lawler
- Dr Alison Cleary
- Dr Madeleine Beaumont
- Dr Kimberley Stuart
- Dr Jak Ma
- Dr Jess Collins
- Helga Merl
- Prof Anna King
- Prof James Vickers
Collaborators:
Australian Dementia Network (ADNet)
https://islandclinic.utas.edu.au/
