Honors College Fellow featured in UIC Today discussing how underrepresented populations are often excluded from clinical trials for Alzheimer’s treatments
Introduction
Zhuoer Lin, an Honors Fellow and assistant professor in the School of Public Health, helped lead a study analyzing patient populations in U.S. clinical trials for Alzheimer’s treatments.
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"He found that almost half of the trials did not report on race or ethnicity at all, and of those that did, more than 90% of participants identified as white. Comparatively few patients identified as Black, Hispanic, Native American and Asian or Pacific Islander.
Such a gap limits researchers’ understanding of how new treatments affect underrepresented populations, many of whom have a higher risk, statistically, for Alzheimer’s disease than white older adults do. Compared to white older adults, Black older adults are twice as likely to develop the neurodegenerative disease. For Hispanic older adults, the risk is 1.5 times more.
“Especially in a country as diverse as the U.S., clinical trials need to represent all populations,” Lin said.