ATLANTA—Psychology researchers at Georgia State University have received a $77,000 grant from the National Institutes of Health to examine brain differences between African-Americans and Caucasians with Alzheimer’s disease.
“African Americans are twice as likely to develop Alzheimer’s disease than Caucasians, but we don’t know exactly why that is,” said Maria Misiura, a doctoral student in psychology who is working with Jessica Turner, associate professor of psychology, and the principal investigator for the study. “Even when we control for various lifestyle and genetic factors that are entangled with ethno-racial identity, it still doesn’t fully explain the increased prevalence levels.”
Turner said African-Americans have also not been well represented in previous studies of Alzheimer’s disease.
“Participating in some of these studies is a costly thing to do,” she said. “Your caretaker has to find the time to take off work to bring you in and that can be very tricky. So just by convenience these studies tend to pull from a group of people with more resources.”
The researchers also noted that within the African-American community there is sometimes mistrust toward the scientific community stemming from ethical violations that have happened in the past. The most notorious of these was the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, an unethical clinical study conducted from 1932 to 1972 by the U.S. Public Health Service in which medical treatment was intentionally withheld from African-American study participants without their knowledge.
“Getting in to work with some of the older populations of African-American people and breaking down those barriers has been a challenge for the scientific community in these studies,” Misiura said. “Additionally, some of the biological measures used to diagnose Alzheimer’s disease have been developed in studies with primarily Caucasian populations and require further research with understudied populations to be fully generalizable to other ethnic groups.”
In the project, “Examining Brain Network Disruptions in African Americans and Caucasians with Alzheimer’s Disease,” Turner and Misiura will work with Emory University neurologist William Hu. The team will use imaging, biomarker and clinical data collected at Emory hospitals to analyze the data of about 150 people, including African-Americans and non-Hispanic whites, some of whom will be healthy controls and others individuals with dementia.
Turner said the team will be examining brain scans using functional magnetic resonance imaging (functional MRI or fMRI), a type of imaging procedure that measures brain activity in its natural, resting state.
“It’s easy to use and very reliable,” Turner said. “You are also looking at the default state of the brain. It’s not looking at what your brain is doing when it is dysfunctioning. It’s looking at predispositions to having those problems. It gives you quite a wealth of information to work with.
“We are looking for patterns in data on parts of the brain that are acting together. The question is, can we identify what’s going on in these networks if they are working together? And are they interacting with each other together in the same way in different groups of people?”
For more information on the grant, go to: 1R03AG061660-01.
Dr. Turner’s research interests fall under “what can we know from cognitive neuroimaging and genetic data,” and “how can we represent what we know from these experiments?”