The Toronto Dementia Research Alliance (TDRA) Dementia Clinical Research Database: A Platform in Neurodegenerative Diseases

Project Overview

The Toronto Dementia Research Alliance will establish a clinical research platform that will provide a consistent and efficient approach to managing research and clinical care in patients with neurodegenerative conditions. The platform will provide epidemiological data, track disease burden, fill gaps in medical evidence such as therapeutic effectiveness, performance measurement for the purpose of quality improvement, and enable evaluation of “real world” effectiveness of medical therapies in practice outside the highly controlled conditions of clinical trials. Complementary information obtained through future linkage beyond the 3-year term of this project with the provincial Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences (ICES) will provide additional information to manage and improve the effectiveness of the health system, and identify ineffective interventions, missed opportunities and duplication of services. This will lead to better management and evaluation of public health interventions including health promotion and risk reduction, all of which can impact on decreasing costs to the healthcare system. The platform will also have the flexibility to create and enter new standardized information in the face of advancing knowledge, thus contributing to sustainability within the context of a basic framework. This platform will provide a resource to accelerate innovation for research in neurodegenerative diseases, access to data sets for detailed cohort studies and appropriate patient selection for entry into therapeutic clinical trials.

Partners and Donors

University of Toronto

Centre for Addiction and Mental Health

Baycrest

Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre

University Health Network (UHN)