Diagnostic and prognostic approaches to Alzheimer’s Disease that utilize speech and language biomarkers offer great promise. However, optimization of such methodologies requires access to high quality comprehensive speech-sample databases where subjects have also been highly characterized in respect of their brain health. In this proposal the Australian Imaging, Biomarkers and Lifestyle Study of Aging (AIBL) will contribute to establishing such a dataset via collection of speech data in association with the collection of auxiliary clinical and cognitive data routinely collected in the AIBL longitudinal cohort. AIBL is one of the largest, well characterized, longitudinal cohorts of healthy aging and cognitive decline in the world. AIBL focuses on the development of Alzheimer’s Disease.  The AIBL cohort comprises more than 2500 subjects, all aged over sixty at recruitment. This includes the AIBL inception cohort of ~1100 subjects who commenced in 2006. Every 18 months all volunteers undergo extensive psychological and cognitive assessments and examination of lifestyle factors. Most subjects also undergo brain imaging (routinely with MRI and amyloid PET, and some with tau PET) in each cycle. CSF is collected on a smaller portion of the cohort. Subjects are also increasingly being characterised via blood based biomarkers with blood being collected at all visits and stored in liquid nitrogen for future analysis.

AIBL clinical sites located in Perth and Melbourne will participate in the study via collection of speech data in association with the standard AIBL battery of neuropsychological tests.