Community Engagement in Diverse Populations for Alzheimer Disease Prevention Trials

This article describes the challenge of recruiting to clinical trials and studies healthy volunteers without symptoms of Alzheimer's disease, especially African Americans. To find a solution, the authors used a community engagement approach to create a registry of 2,311 research-ready, healthy adult volunteers who reflected an ethnically diverse local community in North Carolina. The approach had varying levels of success in establishing a large, diverse pool of individuals who were interested in participating in pharmacological prevention trials and met the criteria for primary prevention research trials designed to delay the onset of Alzheimer's. The findings suggest that entry criteria for these types of clinical trials need to be inclusive of African Americans.

Romero HR, Welsh-Bohmer KA, Gwyther LP, et al. Community engagement in diverse populations for Alzheimer disease prevention trials. Alzheimer's Disease and Associated Disorders 2014;28(3):269-274.