Core E - Outreach, Recruitment, and Engagement Core

PROJECT SUMMARY The ORE Core functions as bidirectional bridge between our ADRC and the diverse San Francisco Bay Area (SFBA) communities that are underserved and underrepresented in our center. Our Core works through three broad pillars of action developed in close collaboration with our community partners: 1) clinical care for adults with AD/ADRD from vulnerable backgrounds, 2) education on brain health and AD/ADRD for laypersons and health care providers, and 3) multimodal art- and movement-based engagements for brain health. These pillars of action serve as the main pipelines of recruitment of cognitively healthy and impaired diverse populations into our ADRC, including our Chinese American, Latino American and an emerging Black/African American cohorts. In addition, we promote participant retention through annual research education events tailored to our cohorts, in which we share individualized research visit summaries that outline the main clinical findings and recommendations stemming from each research visit with the participants and their primary care providers. Moreover, our ORE Core has developed an innovative outreach approach that targets communities living in the most vulnerable neighborhoods of San Francisco, with neighborhood vulnerability measured across various social determinants of brain health (SDOBH). We couple this outreach approach with our center’s SDOBH Project, which aims to construct lifetime exposomes of our diverse ADRC participants based on a multidomain SDOBH questionnaire created by our ORE Core, with the overarching goal of developing individualized polysocial risk scores linked with specific brain health outcomes, including AD/ADRD. The ORE Core works to ensure that our center’s Clinical, Imaging, Biomarker, and Neuropathology Cores can characterize ADRD in historically underrepresented populations while investigating specific associations between SDOBH factors and imaging, genetic, fluid-based, and neuropathological biomarkers of AD/ADRD. For this cycle, we will strengthen our outreach and engagement operations to maintain our existing cohorts of Chinese and Latino American participants from vulnerable backgrounds, while aiming to recruit and retain a cohort of 30 Black/African American (20 patients and 10 controls) participants form the SFBA. We will strengthen our community based participatory research approaches by creating three community based advisory boards (CABs) focused on further understanding and mitigating barriers to research participation Chinese, Latino, and Black/African Americans from vulnerable backgrounds. Finally, we will strengthen our educational efforts targeting our partner community clinics through an innovative program aimed at creating awareness of mild cognitive impairment, mild behavioral impairment, atypical AD, FTLD spectrum disorders, chronic traumatic encephalopathy syndrome, and prion disease among primary care providers, to improve referrals of these patients to our ADRC.