Cognitive Assessment Battery (CAB) Beta Study

Huntington's disease (HD) is an autosomal dominant genetic disease which typically manifests beginning in adulthood in the form of movement symptoms, cognitive decline, and psychiatric changes. The proposed research is undertaken in collaboration with CHDI Foundation, Inc., a not for profit organization dedicated to finding treatments for HD. CHDI's goal is to develop or help to develop both symptomatic and disease modifying treatments for HD. To enable future therapeutic trials, CHDI has sponsored several prospective, longitudinal, observational biomarker studies of pre-manifest and early HD with the goal of determining which combination of measures is the most sensitive for detecting changes over the natural progression of pre-manifest and early HD. These and other studies have demonstrated a progressive decline in cognitive function in patients with the huntingtin gene mutation beginning in the pre-manifest period and progressing throughout the course of the disease. These findings support the use of cognitive measures as endpoints in future therapeutic clinical trials. CHDI is committed to the development of a cognitive assessment battery for use in HD therapeutic trials. There will be paper and pencil and computerized cognitive tests given over a six week period to non-HD control subjects, pre-manifest HD and early manifest HD subjects.