17 - Shifting Paradigms and Centering Diversity in Brain Health Research

This course will highlight several conceptual and methodological issues related to our understanding of brain health for older African Americans. The conceptual issues will be framed in terms of the well-documented racial differences in cognitive test performance between older African Americans and non-Latino White Americans and how they relate to risk of Alzheimer’s disease. The course will describe a program of research that has attempted to de-construct racial differences by understanding within-race heterogeneity for cognitive aging and the race-relevant risk factors that impact cognition in African Americans. Efforts at building a longitudinal cohort study that has been ongoing for close to two decades will be described, as well as the strategic layering of ancillary studies of neuroimaging and neuropathology to fill gaps in our knowledge base. By the end of the course, participants will be able to evaluate risk factors across the life course that influence cognition in older African Americans and assess how some social exposures may contribute to cognitive decline and risk of disease.