The Need for National Engagement in Alzheimer's Disease Prevention Strategies

With a heightened sense of urgency, considerable effort, attention and funding has been placed on accelerating efforts to prevent and effectively treat Alzheimer’s disease (AD). As a result, a growing number of prevention studies have been launched or are in various stages of planning. The challenge is finding enough participants to fill these studies. In fact, enrollment and retention of participants are considered to be amongst the biggest challenges researchers face. Moreover, even when studies do meet their enrollment goals, individuals from diverse populations, particularly African Americans and Hispanics/Latinos, are often underrepresented. As the field of AD shifts emphasis from recruiting symptomatic patients for treatment studies toward recruiting cognitively unimpaired healthy adults for prevention studies, it is imperative that we understand how to effectively and efficiently recruit, engage and retain participants, with particular attention to recognizing the needs of underrepresented diverse populations. This session will focus on current initiatives to accelerate recruitment into AD prevention studies, efforts to increase participation of individuals from underrepresented populations, as well as discuss emerging national and global strategies.