Recruit & Retain Participants

The Massachusetts Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center offers an eight-page handout and presentation on participating in Alzheimer’s disease clinical research.

This brochure provides an overview of the Alzheimer’s Outreach Program at the University of Pittsburgh Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center, which invites African Americans age 60 or older to participate in research as healthy volunteers.

This video shows a message from the director of the Memory and Aging Project of the Knight Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center at Washington University in St. Louis to research participants and their family during COVID-19.

A one-page flyer from the Wisconsin Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center explains the brain donation process in six simple steps.

The BrightFocus Foundation’s Clinical Trials Finder asks a series of questions to help users find an appropriate Alzheimer’s disease clinical trial. The foundation has also developed a brochure, “Clinical Trials: Your Questions Answered.” BrightFocus funds scientific research worldwide related to Alzheimer’s disease. “Turning Point” is a documentary (2.5 hours, 2017) that provides an inside look at the doctors, scientists and patients who are working to uncover the mysteries of Alzheimer’s...

The authors of this integrative review found that passive, indirect recruitment strategies have been the default approach for enrolling older African Americans into chronic illness-related research studies, including Alzheimer's studies. They recommend the use of proactive, culturally appropriate recruitment approaches, combined with caring recruiter behaviors, that explicitly target older African American adults and that involve direct interactions between prospective participants and the...

For the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative 3 (ADNI3) trial, 462 new participants were enrolled. Recruitment metrics were recorded on 82,003 unique visitors to the recruitment website and 3,335 calls to study phone numbers. The recruitment sources that produced the most screening and enrollment included online advertisements, local radio and newspaper coverage, and emails and referrals from patient registries. According to the authors, ADNI3 is an example of how a data-driven approach to...

The rarity of disorders caused by frontotemporal lobar degeneration (FTLD) leads to recruitment challenges for related clinical trials and difficulties with adequate power to detect treatment effects. The authors of this systematic review recommend developing personalized endpoints that are most clinically meaningful to individuals and their families, devising more powerful approaches to analyzing heterogeneous clinical and magnetic resonance imaging data, and developing new fluid biomarkers and...

Using the CTSdatabase, a registry with more than 60,000 participants, the study authors found that nearly 4% of participants who were screened for memory loss studies visited more than one site within two years. Potential Alzheimer’s participants who went to additional sites did so predominantly for nonmemory conditions, often major depressive disorder or schizophrenia. According to the study authors, multiple enrollments confound efficacy and safety signals in clinical trials. They speculate...

For this study, 10,450 participants enrolled in an initial cohort study were asked to complete a six-lesson interactive education course, AlzU.org, about Alzheimer’s disease. Participants in the highest lesson completion group demonstrated the greatest screening rates for the Anti-Amyloid Treatment in Asymptomatic Alzheimer's Disease (A4) trial. In a subsequent randomized-controlled trial, 351 new participants were enrolled in the six-lesson course (n = 180) versus a time-neutral control course...