We study the potential importance of early life cognitive and brain alterations associated with apolipoprotein (APOE)-?4, an allele linked to increased risk of later life Alzheimer's disease (AD, Genin et al., 2011). With colleagues at Cambridge University, we have recently elicited behavioural differences in young undergraduate APOE-?4 carriers (versus non-carriers) on a novel spatial learning task (Hodgetts et al., in prep). Testing the reliability of this finding, and examination of potential moderators (e.g., gender), now requires larger-scale representative samples. With ALSPAC, therefore, we are writing grants to facilitate new brain imaging and behavioural data collection, as well as analysis of retrospective data. These will address pressing questions about the relationship between early life brain/behavioural changes and later-life cognitive decline.

Here, we propose pilot data collection designed to strengthen a Wellcome Collaboration Award (WCA) between Bristol, Cambridge and Oxford Universities. In the WCA, one key objective is to carry out online data collection using versions of the cognitive paradigms we have established - in smaller scale studies - to be sensitive to APOE-?4 status. This move towards online cognitive tasks (applicable throughout the lifespan and in different cohorts), and large-scale population-level analysis, is new to our research. We do not yet have pilot data that shows, unequivocally, our ability to (a) develop cognitive tasks to enable sensible and robust behavioural assessment and (b) apply these in populations, specifically ALSPAC, underpinning our proposed WCA.