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As National Hispanic Heritage Month draws to a close, the Brain Health Registry (BHR) is proud to announce the official launch of the Spanish-language BHR! Now, our website, study tasks, and participant communications are all available in Spanish!
The CAL-BHR Initiative
In November 2020, we let you know about the California Latino – Brain Health Registry (CAL-BHR) project. Funded by the California Department of Public Health, the goal of this project is to recruit and engage more older Latino individuals in brain health research.
To make BHR more accessible to Spanish speakers, we spent the last year working with professional translators to create a Spanish version of our study.
We believe that a bilingual BHR is one step towards helping to improve future clinical research studies by making them more inclusive of diverse populations. In the future we hope to offer more language options so even more participants from different backgrounds can participant in BHR and other research studies.
Addressing the Need for More Inclusive Research
One of BHR’s overarching goals is to accelerate the search for treatments for brain diseases that can benefit all communities. To do this, we need our participants to be representative and include people from all walks for life.
So, what does this mean?
Although Latino and Black individuals will comprise nearly 40% of the 8.4 million Americans projected to be living with Alzheimer’s disease in 2030, these groups remain woefully underrepresented in research studies.
Furthermore, the Latino community is culturally, genetically, and geographically diverse. This needs to be considered when designing research studies to identify the societal and environmental factors that influence health.
According to data from the Alzheimer’s Association, Latino individuals are 1.5 times more likely than non-Latino white individuals to develop Alzheimer’s disease. This undue burden on the Latino community is an urgent public health crisis that must be addressed through strong scientific research, which can then inform policy.
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We encourage you to tell Spanish-speaking friends and family members about the Spanish BHR. You can let them know to visit the following website for more information: lafamiliabhr.org. To the Spanish-speakers who have already joined us, les agradecemos por su participación!
