Alberto Costa
Case Western Reserve University, OH·Neuroscience
Down syndrome, caused by an extra copy of chromosome 21, is the most common genetic cause of intellectual disability. It is also a major cause of Alzheimer's-type dementia that begins early in life.
- Fields
Neuroscience
Medicine & Clinical Research
Pharmacology
- Topics
Down syndrome
trisomy 21
intellectual disability
- Grants
- 1 known grant, last ended Aug 2026
What they work on
- Analyze EEG recordings, including auditory brainstem responses and mismatch negativity, from the memantine trial and relate them to cognitive and adaptive test scores in adolescents and young adults with Down syndrome.
- Examine how blood plasma markers of Alzheimer's disease measured at the end of the memantine trial relate to performance on memory, thinking and adaptive behavior tests in participants with Down syndrome.
- Build a de-identified database of all clinical, neuropsychological, EEG and biomarker data from the trial and contribute it to the NIH INCLUDE Project through its Data Coordinating Center.
More about the research
Finding medicines that improve thinking in people with Down syndrome, and markers that track brain health, are long-standing goals. This project mines and shares data from one of the largest clinical trials in Down syndrome to date.
Why it matters
Linking brain-signal and blood markers to cognitive test scores could point to measurable signs of brain function and Alzheimer's risk in people with Down syndrome. Such markers may help future drug trials. Sharing a large, diverse trial dataset through the INCLUDE Project lets other researchers study co-occurring conditions in Down syndrome without collecting new data.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Anson Kairys
University of Michigan, MI·Neuroscience·Early-career
Compare subjective (self-reported) and objective (test-based) cognitive function between people with fibromyalgia and healthy controls, and assess how co-occurring symptoms shape the relationship between the two.
Edward Golob
University of Texas at San Antonio, TX·Psychology
Test the common cause hypothesis by using structural equation modeling on batteries of hearing, attention and cognitive tests in young and older adults, asking whether attention control or attentional effort are shared mechanisms and how attention explains age differences.
Tian Zhao
University of Washington, WA·Neuroscience
Test whether infants with a family history of developmental language disorder show a longer sensitive period for speech learning than low-risk infants, by comparing brain responses at about 6, 12 and 14 months.
The school
Case Western Reserve University: 34 labs on PI Pages, $643M a year on research, 213 research doctorates a year.
Reach out
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