Data sharing

Open the door to a world of data

Question: What do these study questions from published papers have in common? What’s the relationship between widowhood and depression in the United States, Europe, Korea, and China? How and why do disability and morbidity among older people differ across 30 countries and three continents? Does making transportation universally accessible through free bus passes for older people in the United Kingdom reduce social isolation and increase physical activity?

Data infrastructure for aging research

Though research on age differences has its place, almost by definition, research on aging involves tracking people over time periods long enough to observe long-term changes in their lives and health. And, accurate measurements of large samples can be an expensive undertaking. The NIA has made major investments to create and maintain data resources that can be used for dozens—and in some cases, hundreds—of analyses, using the tools of the behavioral and social sciences.

From mouse to medicine: Improving preclinical research in Alzheimer's disease

Alzheimer’s drug discovery and development is not for the fainthearted. It’s extremely expensive and time-consuming, and the possibility of disappointment looms at every phase of discovery. According to one analysis, half of candidate therapies fail during preclinical research—the phase when important information on feasibility, testing, and drug safety is collected. And, if a promising therapy does advance to a clinical trial, another recent analysis indicates there’s a 98 percent failure rate during phase II and III, primarily due to lack of efficacy.

Health ABC data now available through NIA website

We are excited to let you know that NIA has a resource for investigators seeking to analyze biomedical data. The Health, Aging and Body Composition (Health ABC) Study began in 1997 and collected data for 17 years on a cohort of older black and white adults living in Memphis and Pittsburgh. Participants were aged 70-79 at baseline. These data are now online on NIA’s website and available to qualified researchers. We invite you to take a look!

Increasing the usability of big data for Alzheimer's research

On October 11, 2016, the first manuscript describing a treasure trove of genomic data contributed by members of the Accelerating Medicines Partnership for Alzheimer’s Disease (AMP-AD) Target Discovery and Preclinical Validation Consortium was published in Nature Scientific Data. The publication of the datasets and their description are part of an NIH-wide effort to bring together big data and experts from diverse disciplines to better understand dementia, as well as other chronic conditions.

Data sharing: The name of the game in Alzheimer's research

Thousands of gene candidates in the human genome have the potential to play a role in the onset and progression of Alzheimer’s disease. But you are just one scientist. How can you even start such an enormous task? This quest—one scientist analyzing thousands of gene candidates—can seem overwhelming. I want to share with you two great NIA-funded resources that collect and store biological specimens and data—and are available to you and the wider research community.

Access international data from HRS “family of studies”

NIA is supporting a unique new website—the Gateway to Global Aging Data—that enables cross-national comparisons of the health, social, and economic status of older people. If you haven’t looked at what’s available, or you haven’t looked recently, I encourage you to check it out. Do you need to know if people in Estonia smoke more than people in Germany? What might be behind why people in Japan live longer than people in other developed countries? The Gateway makes it easy to create interactive graphs and tables to immediately examine population estimates of various countries over time. You can generate graphs and tables to compare the same measures between sub-populations within a country or quickly identify cross-country differences, as well as changes over time.

Open the portal door to Alzheimer's Big Data

The explosion of Big Data promises to transform biomedical research, but all too often researchers are stymied by limited access to these complex biomedical data sets. To overcome some of these barriers, we’ve recently helped launch an important new data resource—the AMP AD Knowledge Portal.

Freely accessible to the...

NCRAD: Increasing infrastructure for Alzheimer’s disease researchers

Learn how growth and new resources in the National Centralized Repository for Alzheimer’s Disease and Related Dementias (NCRAD) could be a big help for your team’s future investigations!

Data management and sharing requirements: Tips and tricks to plan ahead

You don’t need to wait until 2023 to embrace data sharing! As this new NIH-wide policy gets closer to implementation, here are some tips to get ready.