The proposed Subject Recruitment Core builds upon a successful subject registry (the """"""""Harvard Cooperative Program on Aging""""""""), developed during the past 4 years to support clinical research in the Harvard OIAC. The principal aims of the Core are to: 1) support intervention, intervention development, and pilot projects by providing sources of well-characterized elderly subjects; 2) Increase the recruitment of subjects from minority populations; 3) Develop new research projects from the registry database; and 4) Disseminate information from OIAS projects to registry participants, as well as the local lay and professional community. The Recruitment Core will be directed by Dr. Lewis Lipsitz, an established clinical investigator with extensive experience in recruiting elderly research subjects from both community and nursing home settings. Day-to-day recruitment, screening, communication with participants, and referrals to investigators will be coordinated by Robeta Rosenberg, MEd, an experienced educator and administrator who has helped build the registry to its current size of over 1000 participants. The core will support Dr. Resnick's intervention development project focussed on the treatment of detrusor overactivity, by recruiting elderly people with urge incontinence. In year 1, two pilot projects will be supported by providing access to demented institutionalized elderly residents with behavior problems for Dr. Camberg, and elderly patients treated with antihypertensive agents for Dr. Monane. Recruitment is facilitated by an existing registry and database of both community-dwelling and institutionalized elderly that will be expanded through advertisements, distribution of a newsletter, collaboration with the Boston VA Normative Aging Study, access to the HRCA Research Nursing Home consortium of long-term care facilities, and strong relationships with numerous health care, social service, and religious organizations in minority neighborhoods of Boston. Thus, the duplicative costly, and labor intensive recruitment efforts of multiple clinical research projects can be minimized by the continuation and expansion of the subject recruitment core.
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