When she entered the field of Alzheimer’s research a quarter century ago, Lisa Barnes was deeply disappointed to find few Black people like her family members with dementia were being studied. A rarity herself — as a Black female cognitive neuropsychologist — she’s spent her career quietly pushing back.
Since 2004, Barnes has been running the Minority Aging Research Study, one of the nation’s largest studies of Alzheimer’s focused exclusively on Black people and has created a brain bank used by other researchers to understand the illness in this population. This was no easy feat.
But because there’s been scant research in Black populations, and barely any brains from Black people without dementia to study, understanding these critical differences — and potential treatments they may lead to — remains a distant goal. Barnes isn’t convinced that a widely cited statistic, that Black Americans are twice as likely to get the disease, is true, because there’s a dearth of data from brains of Black people and Black older adults tend to perform more poorly on the standard cognitive testing used to assess people for the disease due to a host of educational and cultural differences.
