N.C. A&T Alzheimer’s Study Targets Blacks, The Group Most Affected by the Disease - Higher Education

N.C. A&T Alzheimer’s Study Targets Blacks, The Group Most Affected by the Disease - Higher Education: The planned opening of a brand-new, 3,100-square-foot building at North Carolina A&T State University later this year will mark another milestone in A&T’s role as lead research site for the first and largest study of Alzheimer’s disease among Blacks.

This state-of-the-art facility will house Dr. Goldie Byrd—lead investigator of the African Americans Alzheimer’s Disease Study and Nathan F. Simms Endowed professor of biology at A&T—and her research team and other support staff. This study aims to discover why Alzheimer’s strikes Blacks more than any other racial group in the United States. Researchers from A&T and three other colleges—the University of Miami, Vanderbilt University and Columbia University—aspire to enroll 7,000 volunteers in their groundbreaking effort. So far, 1,620 have signed up, a far cry from the few dozen Black volunteers who signed up for the study when it was housed at Duke University until moved to historically Black A&T in 2003.