Roderick Blair was surprised when scientific researchers appeared on his doorstep in the Homewood neighborhood of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Here, on a recent summer day, police cars, an ambulance and a TV reporter crowded into a driveway on the edge of the neighborhood. A helicopter swung overhead.
Saplings peeked over rooflines from gutters, windows were broken, screens tattered, doors boarded up and rippling sidewalks crumbled. Bedraggled chain link fences held back the season’s tall grass. Blair’s address had been randomly selected to participate in a research trial on healthy eating.
Blair, a 70-year-old retired emergency preparedness worker who spent a career on Capitol Hill, was not enthusiastic. For more than a decade, he participated in a series of data collection efforts – wearing a sleep monitor and a fitness watch, answering detailed and highly personal survey questions about education, childhood experiences and even sexual abuse. Finally, he was asked to take a cognitive test.
And they said eventually, ‘We’d like to do cognitive tests on you.’ I said, ‘That won’t happen.’” It was a “delightful” young test proctor who changed his mind, and he finally took that test too – twice. This last assessment was meant to capture cognitive changes – specifically Alzheimer’s disease. But Blair – and the roughly 600 other participants – may never learn the results of his cognitive tests, despite what researchers promised and now have all the data to do so.
They won’t know because this grant, like hundreds of others nationally, was terminated by the Trump administration. This was the “Phresh” study, a 15-year-long research project that began as an examination of food deserts. It evolved into a rich set of data on the life course, wellbeing and eventually cognitive health of two aging, low-income and majority Black neighborhoods just a few miles from a major Alzheimer’s research hub, the University of Pittsburgh.
Now, the funding cuts have the potential to unnecessarily delay diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease or dementia syndromes in the group – diseases whose treatments rely on early diagnosis. Nearly 7 million people in the US live with Alzheimer’s. Most are white, but Black Americans have nearly double the risk of developing Alzheimer’s dementia, according to the Alzheimer’s Association.
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