The Brain Donation Program in South Korea

Abstract

Purpose: Obtaining brain tissue is critical to definite diagnosis and to furthering understanding of neurodegenerative diseases. The present authors have maintained the National Neuropathology Reference and Diagnostic Laboratories for Dementia in South Korea since 2016. We have built a nationwide brain bank network and are collecting brain tissues from patients with neurodegenerative diseases. We are aiming to facilitate analyses of clinic-pathological and image-pathological correlations of neurodegenerative disease and to broaden understanding thereof.

Materials and methods: We recruited participants through two routes: from memory clinics and the community. As a baseline evaluation, clinical interviews, a neurological examination, laboratory tests, neuropsychological tests, and MRI were undertaken. Some patients also underwent amyloid PET.

Results: We recruited 105 participants, 70 from clinics and 35 from the community. Among them, 11 died and were autopsied. The clinical diagnoses of the autopsied patients included four with Alzheimer's disease (AD), two with subcortical vascular dementia, two with non-fluent variant primary progressive aphasia, one with leukoencephalopathy, one with frontotemporal dementia (FTD), and one with Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD). Five patients underwent amyloid PET: two with AD, one with mixed dementia, one with FTD, and one with CJD.

Conclusion: The clinical and neuropathological information to be obtained from this cohort in the future will provide a deeper understanding of the neuropathological mechanisms of cognitive impairment in Asia, especially Korea.

Keywords: Alzheimer's disease; Neuropathology; amyloid; brain autopsy; frontotemporal dementia.

Fig. 1. (A) Flow chart of the overall recruitment process for brain donation. (B) Flow chart of the recruitment process for brain donation from the community.

Fig. 2. Clinical diagnosis of participants recruited from clinics. AD, Alzheimer's disease; FTD, frontotemporal dementia; MCI, mild cognitive impairment; NC, normal cognition; PD, Parkinson's disease; VCI, vascular cognitive impairment; Others, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (n=1), amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (n=1), leukoencephalopathy (n=2), and epilepsy (n=2).