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Notice of Special Interest (NOSI): Promoting research to understand vascular contributions to cognitive impairment and dementia (VCID)

National Institutes of Health

The purpose of this Notice is to inform potential applicants about an area of special interest to NHLBI, NINDS and NIA in research to understand mechanisms of vascular contributions to cognitive impairment and dementia (VCID) and to develop new approaches for the treatment of VCID.

Background and Research Objectives

This Notice is intended to encourage collaborative and multidisciplinary research to understand VCID, which is defined as the aging neurovascular unit being confronted with and failing to cope with biological insults due to systemic and cerebral vascular disease, proteinopathy including Alzheimer’s biology, metabolic disease, and immune response, resulting in cognitive decline. VCID research overlays multiple clinical diagnoses, including cerebro- and cardio-vascular disease, stroke, AD dementia and other types of dementia, some of which involve neither AD dementia or stroke.

Dementia is a public health crisis and is an umbrella term that describes loss of cognitive function, including thinking, remembering, reasoning, as well as behavioral abilities, that is severe enough to interfere with one’s daily life. Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is the most common clinical dementia diagnosis, but it is increasingly recognized that AD as a clinical syndrome has mixed pathology and multifactorial etiology. Having biomarker evidence of AD is not equivalent of AD clinical syndrome. Individuals with AD pathology (Aβ deposition and pathologic tau) might not develop dementia without underlying vascular dysfunctions or other co-existing conditions. Vascular pathology is frequently part of typical clinical AD. Human pathology findings suggest that over 50% of clinical AD patients have vascular injuries. Because of the mixed pathology and diverse etiology of dementia, a holistic approach with trans-disciplinary research teams would be needed to understand the diverse and overlapping pathologies leading to dementia.

Besides the effects of aging, chronic systemic comorbidities are associated with cognitive outcomes and the common dementia-associated pathologies. NINDS, NIA and NHLBI have shared interests in VCID. As the NIH lead for VCID, NINDS has broad interests in all areas of this topic. NHLBI has particular interest in VCID related to sequelae of heart, lung, blood and sleep disorders. NIA’s interests in VCID are related to Alzheimer’s disease and Alzheimer’s related dementia.

Application and Submission Information

This notice applies to application receipt dates on or after February 5, 2022 and subsequent receipt dates through May 8, 2025.

NOT-HL-23-002