# Life Course Center for the Demography and Economics of Aging > **NIH NIH P30** · UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA · 2024 · $266,166 ## Abstract PROJECT SUMMARY/ABSTRACT This administrative supplement will support pilot work to quantify the effect of structural white advantage (SWA) – policies and practices that provide greater resources and power to people racialized as white – on cognitive health and ADRD risk among older US adults. The SWA framework complements structural racism work by specifying the US context in which white racialization predominates the social hierarchy, providing insight into how structural advantages promote cumulative cognitive health and the reduction of ADRD risk in later life relative to multiple ethno-racial groups. Understanding the link between SWA and cognitive health may reveal the effectiveness of policies/programs that target the distribution of resources to dominated groups (non-white) to promote health equity. Additionally, the SWA framework provides a theoretical grounding to dissect potential heterogeneities in cognitive reserve processes and outcomes among those racialized as white, providing additional clues on how the intersection among structural inequities (e.g., SWA and classism) drives ADRD disparities at the population level. A vital step in linking SWA to cognitive health is to operationalize and measure SWA. The proposed project will 1) use administrative data to measure differential access to resources and power between white and non-white groups and 2) apply confirmatory factor analysis to derive the SWA index. The objective of the proposed project is to quantify the later-life cognitive health effects of SWA exposure in early life and midlife for white, Black, and Hispanic participants from the nationally representative Health and Retirement Survey. Results from the proposed supplement project will provide preliminary data for an R01 proposal that will examine relationships between SWA exposure and ADRD outcomes across additional NIA- funded cohorts and assess for differential impacts by population and geography and intervening biological mechanisms on cognitive function and ADRD risk. The R01 will also develop and test upstream structural measures of the policies and practices that produce SWA to identify targets for potential interventions to reduce ADRD disparities. The proposed supplement aligns with the overall aims of the Minnesota Life Course Center for the Demography and Economics of Aging (LCC) in three ways. (1) It brings together a new interdisciplinary team to support the development of a promising junior scholar moving into research on the structural determinants of cognitive health. (2) It will generate evidence of exposure to structural equities in early and midlife as a predictor of the late-life risk of and racial disparities in ADRD risk among older adults. (3) Making the SWA indexes publicly available aligns with the goals of the LCC’s External Innovative Network Core (the Network for Data-Intensive Research on Aging [NDIRA]), which supports the use of novel data for research on population aging. ## Key facts - **NIH application ID:** 10940390 - **Project number:** 3P30AG066613-05S1 - **Recipient organization:** UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA - **Principal Investigator:** Sarah M Flood - **Activity code:** P30 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.) - **Funding institute:** NIH - **Fiscal year:** 2024 - **Award amount:** $266,166 - **Award type:** 3 - **Project period:** 2020-07-01 → 2026-06-30 ## Primary source NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10940390 ## Citation > US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10940390, Life Course Center for the Demography and Economics of Aging (3P30AG066613-05S1). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-27 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10940390. Licensed CC0. --- *[NIH grants dataset](/datasets/nih-grants) · CC0 1.0*