The Education and Information Transfer Core of the ADRC builds upon nearly 20 years of experience linking education and community outreach efforts to important laboratory-based investigation, as well as the extensive, well-developed educational resources of the Harvard Medical School (HMS) Division on Aging, the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) Gerontology Division, and the Hebrew Rehabilitation Center for Aged (HRCA) Research and Training Institute. The Principal Investigator, Lewis A. Lipsitz, M.D., holds appointments at all 3 institutions, each of which is largely focused on clinical issues related to the care of AD patients. Over the past 5 years we have trained 30 geriatric medicine fellows, 45 medical residents, 19 medical students, 4 post-doctoral research fellows, and 5 postdoctoral nurses in the area of AD and related dementias. We have disseminated information about dementia to over 35,000 community-dwelling elders through presentations, newsletters, and seminars. We have also completed postmortem analyses of 13 normal brains from people whose average age is 90 +/- 7 years. In this application we propose new projects in areas of professional education and information dissemination about AD to the African-American, Chinese-speaking, and Latino populations of Boston. Furthermore, we will continue the successful Memory and Aging Project that collects brains for postmortem examination from cognitively normal elderly individuals.
The specific aims of the Core are: 1) To enhance the professional education of physicians in the diagnosis, management, and investigation of AD, 2) To increase the level of knowledge of non-professional caregivers and all consumers about the manifestations and management of AD and other dementias, and 3) To provide normal brain tissue from well-characterized elderly residents of the Hebrew Rehabilitation Center for Aged who agree to make brain donations to the ADRC Brain Bank when they die. In order to accomplish these goals, the ADRC has allied itself closely with several organizations, including The Massachusetts Alzheimer's Association, Boston Multicultural Coalition on Aging, local hospitals, and the Harvard Division on Aging.
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