Every day, research leads to understanding new scientific advancements; however, there is an area that is still lacking when it comes to performing the research. Many minorities tend to be excluded from research studies, which causes for a lack of understanding for how certain issues may affect a certain minority. A population that experiences this difference is the African American community. Often times, it is not fully understood how a disease may affect an African American due to their underrepresentation in the studies. Recently, more scientists have noticed this matter and begun to focus on this community when performing their research.
A research article titled “Alzheimer disease in African American individuals: increased incidence or not enough data?” published in 2021 by researcher Lisa L. Barnes presents its readers with the knowledge that “older African American individuals bear a disproportionate burden of AD and cognitive impairment compared with non-Latino white individuals” (Barnes, 2021). However, the cause for this disproportionate burden is not really understood. Barnes brings attention to the fact that most studies from the dementia research community mainly include older, white individuals rather than communities that tend to be more at risk. In order to better understand this issue at hand, Dr. Barnes managed to gather information from a number of studies to make comparisons between African American populations all throughout the United States of America and compared their neuropsychological test performances to White individuals. From this, Barnes was able to resort to a few risk factors including education status, geographical location (North or South), and those who experience social disadvantage and poverty. Although Barnes made some progress towards understanding the possible causes for this disproportionality, she still feels like there is data lacking to reach a conclusion.
There have been other studies that aim at understanding these risk factors experienced by African Americans as well, such as an article published in 2019 titled “Association of Cardiovascular and Alzheimer’s Disease Risk Factors with Intracranial Arterial Blood Flow in Whites and African Americans” by Lindsay R. Clark et al. The researchers who performed this study also recognized that there is more prevalence of AD in the African American community and want to further understand possible risk factors. In order to perform this study, the researchers had 399 subjects whom were cognitively unimpaired adults (both Black and White) and performed physical examinations along with neuroimaging (including 4D-Flow MRI). The aim was to focus on cardiovascular and metabolic risk factors and they observed the “APOE genotype, AD biomarker, and intracranial arterial blood flow” (Clark et al., 2019). From performing this research, the scientists were able to uncover that African Americans had lower intracranial arterial flow when comparing to White individuals; this demonstrated that African Americans are at greater risk for cardiovascular related diseases and previous studies have mentioned that AD is more prevalent in those who have cardiovascular risk. The researchers were also left with inconclusive data as they still need a direct tie with the correlation between increased cardiovascular risk and the development of AD.
Overall, these two research articles demonstrate the importance in including minorities into studying fatal diseases. Due to the lack of representation for the African American community in research studies, many of the results are left inconclusive and in need of more data. This could have been avoided with original involvement of these individuals in the studies to begin with. Involving these individuals in future research studies could allow for scientists to develop more targeted treatments and to better understand the needs of these communities.
References
Clark, Lindsay R et al. “Association of Cardiovascular and Alzheimer's Disease
Risk Factors with Intracranial Arterial Blood Flow in Whites and African Americans.” Journal of Alzheimer's disease : JAD vol. 72,3 (2019): 919-929. https://doi.org/10.3233/JAD-190645
Barnes, L.L. Alzheimer disease in African American individuals: increased incidence or not
enough data?. Nat Rev Neurol 18, 56–62 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41582-021-00589-3
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