As part of its 20th anniversary, Wisconsin Registry for Alzheimer’s Prevention (WRAP) published a print timeline describing the history of the study and milestones in its discoveries. Download a pdf of the timeline here.
WRAP launched in 2001 as a study of adult children of people with Alzheimer’s disease, expanding recruitment to include a control group of people without parental history in 2004. In 2008, the WAI Regional Milwaukee Office opened, establishing outreach and recruitment opportunities between WRAP and Southeast Wisconsin’s African American communities. Some other notable events include:
2009: The PREDICT study in WRAP launched the first lumbar puncture and amyloid PET scan, signifying a new era of biomarker research.
2017: WRAP PI Sterling Johnson, PhD, publishes review of current findings of WRAP. The paper reports 1,561 baseline study visits, including 81% of participants who remained active in the study. The paper also published the finding that healthy lifestyle factors are associated with better cognition and brain structure, as well as lower Alzheimer’s disease-related brain changes.
2018: AA-FAIM study recruits its first WRAP participant. WRAP begins international collaboration with five other Alzheimer’s disease risk studies, the Preclinical Alzheimer’s Consortium (PAC). That same year, NIA awards WRAP more than $19 million over 5 years.
2020: Using data collected over its nineteen years, WRAP scientists discover PET scan biomarkers of amyloid and tau are strongly associated with cognitive trajectories. Also in 2020, WRAP researchers publish a paper on how amyloid chronicity allows scientists to estimate the age when amyloid levels first became abnormal.
2021: WRAP researchers publish a paper defining and validating the term “cognitively unimpaired-declining” to describe research participants who have normal memory but may be at risk for developing MCI or Alzheimer’s disease.