Costs

According to the article authors, the ideal participants for Alzheimer's disease clinical trials would show cognitive decline in the absence of treatment (i.e., placebo arm) and also would be responsive to the therapeutic intervention being studied (i.e., drug arm). This investigation tested whether machine learning models can effectively predict cognitive decline in people with mild to moderate Alzheimer’s disease during the timeframe of a phase III clinical trial. Data from 202 participants...

This article describes a validated two-step process for recruiting asymptomatic amyloid-positive individuals into clinical trials. The process was tested using cohorts from three Alzheimer’s studies (ADNI-MCI, ADNI-CN and INSIGHT). During a pre-screening phase, researchers pre-selected a subset of individuals who were more likely to be amyloid positive, based on the automatic analysis of data acquired during routine clinical practice, before doing a confirmatory PET scan for these selected...

This article synthesized findings from health research studies that evaluated the cost and effectiveness of different recruitment strategies to inform investigators on designing cost-efficient clinical trials. Researchers identified 10 randomized studies that compared recruitment strategies, including monetary incentives (cash or prize), direct contact (letters or telephone call), and medical referral strategies. Only two of the 10 studies compared strategies for recruiting participants to...

Online advertising is a new frontier in research recruitment and Google Adwords is one method of online advertising. However, only a handful of studies have described its cost and effectiveness and none have focused on older adults. This study created a Google Adwords campaign to recruit family caregivers of people with dementia. The study found that the ads were viewed more than 450,000 times in a 6-week period, but only 49 surveys were completed, at a cost of $122 per survey. The paper...

Many research studies report difficulties recruiting enough participants, adding to the time and cost of the study and potentially jeopardizing the generalizability of findings. This article reported on recruitment strategies used in nine dementia-related studies conducted in Australia. Articles, notices, or advertisements in targeted specialist newsletters were the most cost-effective method of recruitment. Online and social media were low-cost but not reliably effective. Beattie E, Fielding E...

Identifying healthy individuals with amyloid pathology is an important challenge for Alzheimer's prevention clinical trials. This paper reported on noninvasive, cost-efficient techniques to detect preclinical Alzheimer's to meet this need. Researchers applied machine learning to structural MRI of 96 cognitively normal subjects to identify amyloid-positive ones. Used for subject classification in a simulated clinical trial setting, the proposed method saved 60 percent on unneeded CSF/PET tests...

This study evaluated the yield and cost of three recruitment strategies—direct mail, newspaper advertisements, and community outreach—for identifying and enrolling dementia caregivers into a trial testing a nonpharmacologic approach to enhancing quality of life of individuals with dementia and their caregivers. A total of 237 dyads enrolled. The total cost of recruitment was $154 per dyad, with direct mail found to be the most effective and least costly method, at $63 per dyad. That compared...

The aim of this study was to describe and compare the time and monetary costs associated with recruiting and interviewing a diverse sample of older adults living in south Florida. Men and women age 60 and older from four ethnic groups—African American, Afro Caribbean, Hispanic American, and European American—were recruited to participate in a longitudinal study of healthy aging. Costs for study activities (including recruitment, scheduling sessions, interviewing, file scoring, log updating...