# Addressing the Knowledge and Recruitment Gap in Alzheimer's Disease and Precision Medicine among Native People: An Innovative Randomized Controlled Trial

> **NIH NIH U54** · UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO DENVER · 2021 · $417,403

## Abstract

ABSTRACT
Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a common form of dementia, but little data exist on the risk and prevalence of AD
among American Indians and Alaska Natives (AI/ANs). Precision medicine (PM) has potential for detecting and
treating diseases such as AD. PM combines data on clinical, genomic, biomarker, and environmental factors
with data on health behaviors to assess individual risk of a given disease. It can maximize the effectiveness of
tailored clinical management. However, no research has addressed AI/AN preferences for communicating
educational or recruitment information for AD or PM studies. AI/ANs experience communication barriers to
research participation, as well as prefer visual aids that assist comprehension and communication that align
with Native traditions. In 2015, President Obama announced a $215 million PM initiative which emphasizes
adequate representation of racial and ethnic minorities. In 2016, NIH funded 8 healthcare organizations to
assemble a cohort of 1 million people who will contribute blood and urine samples along with health,
environmental, and lifestyle data to a population-based repository for PM research (the All of Us Research
Program). We will collaborate with one grantee –
the University of Arizona/Banner Health – that will enroll
10,000 AI/ANs -- to evaluate methods to recruit AI/ANs at their Phoenix-Tucson clinical facilities. AI/AN
informants will help create culturally appropriate recruitment materials (brochures, digital stories) for AD and
PM research. Finally, we will conduct a pragmatic randomized controlled trial with 4,000 AI/ANs enrollees in
the All of Us cohort. Participants will receive either a standard educational brochure on AD and PM and the
importance of research (control) or a culturally tailored, graphics-rich brochure with identical information, and
view a digital story featuring personal narratives of AI/ANs on AD (intervention). Participants will then be invited
to complete an optional AD-PM Module to assesses AD knowledge and attitudes, health literacy, ethnic
identify, and cognition. Upon completion, they will join other AI/ANs who are interested in future AD and PM
research, and link their All of Us data and biospecimens to their AD-PM Module data. Our 2 primary outcomes
will be completion of the AD-PM Module and enrollment in the AD-PM Cohort. The Specific Aims are to: 1) to
evaluate recruitment strategies for AI/ANs in the UAZB program, and address factors that might affect
implementation of our trial; 2) create culturally tailored materials on AD and PM, and evaluate their clarity and
acceptability; 3) conduct a randomized controlled trial to test the effect of these materials on completion of the
AD-PM Module and enrollment in the AD-PM Cohort; and 4) identify patient-level predictors of AD-PM Cohort
enrollment, and evaluate potential differences in the effectiveness of recruitment approach by age, sex,
education, cultural identity, and rurality. The AD-PM Cohort will represent a...

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10164622
- **Project number:** 5U54MD000507-19
- **Recipient organization:** UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO DENVER
- **Principal Investigator:** DEDRA S BUCHWALD
- **Activity code:** U54 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2021
- **Award amount:** $417,403
- **Award type:** 5
- **Project period:** 2003-09-30 → 2024-04-30

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10164622

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10164622, Addressing the Knowledge and Recruitment Gap in Alzheimer's Disease and Precision Medicine among Native People: An Innovative Randomized Controlled Trial (5U54MD000507-19). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-23 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10164622. Licensed CC0.

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