Congratulations Chantel Martin and Taylor Hargrove on R01 from National Institute of Aging

Faculty Fellows Chantel Martin and Taylor Hargrove were recently awarded a collaborative R01 grant from the National Institute on Aging (NIA) for their project entitled “Multilevel Forms of Structural Racism and Racial Inequalities in ADRD Risk.”

Alzheimer’s Disease and Alzheimer’s Disease Related Dementias (AD/ADRD) are on the rise in the United States. Estimates project a 40% increase in AD among older Americans by 2025. This increase, along with its associated economic, social, and health burdens, are likely to have disproportionate impacts, as Black adults have the highest incidence of dementia of any racial/ethnic group in the U.S. Moreover, Black Americans experience higher rates of established biological risk factors for AD/ADRD, including hypertension, diabetes, stroke, inflammation, and biological aging.

The expected growth in AD diagnoses, expenditures, and burdens, as well as potentially widening racial inequalities, make it important to investigate early risk factors for the development of AD/ADRD and racial inequalities in AD/ADRD.

Martin and Hargrove plan to create a public-use, comprehensive data repository of multilevel and repeated contextual measures of structural racism; and use the new contextual data in combination with existing contextual and individual-level longitudinal data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health) to examine specific pathways linking structural racism and AD/ADRD biological risk among early midlife U.S. adults.

Specifically, they will investigate whether structural racism across educational, residential, and criminal justice contexts independently and jointly shape Black-White disparities in biological risk factors for AD/ADRD, including hypertension, diabetes, inflammation, epigenetic aging, and two novel biomarkers of AD/ADRD risk

Findings from this study will advance our understanding of how structural racism shapes AD/ADRD risk early in the life course, and inform the development of population-level, early interventions aimed to slow the progression of AD/ADRD risk and reduce health inequalities in these outcomes.