Nearly seven million people in the U.S. are living with Alzheimer’s and related diseases (ADRD), according to the Alzheimer’s Association — a number that has more than doubled in the last 20 years. While funding and support to advance the science of dementia care has increased substantially, care innovations still need to be successfully implemented outside of healthcare organizations and test cases that are difficult to replicate. To address the issue, the School of Public Health at the University of Minnesota is launching the Establishing Mechanisms of Benefit to Reinforce the Alzheimer’s Care Experience (EMBRACE) AD/ADRD Roybal Center.
The EMBRACE center is supported by a five-year, $5.8 million grant from the National Institute on Aging. It will consist of at least six trials that will rigorously evaluate why dementia care interventions are effective. The center’s goal is to advance research capacity for “mechanism driven” dementia care interventions – an approach to testing interventions that specifically identifies why dementia care interventions work. This information is critical to scale interventions into home and community settings.
The center will guide progress in scaling dementia care by focusing on a specific action, benefit, or behavioral change that is the key to its success. Once this crucial factor is identified, the intervention will be tailored and tested to work within different settings or communities. For example, SPH Assistant Professor Manka Nkimbeng will lead one of the trials in the grant’s first year, which focuses on cognitive behavioral support for family members caring for those with dementia and tailors it to people in the African immigrant community.
“A big issue in dementia care science is that interventions are not always designed with implementation in mind,” says SPH’s Joseph Gaugler, Distinguished McKnight University Professor, Robert L. Kane Endowed Chair in Long-Term Care and Aging, and co-lead of the EMBRACE center along with Andrea Gilmore-Bykovskyi at the University of Wisconsin. “In academia, we are not incentivized to implement and disseminate an evidenced-based intervention, but simply to get it to publication. This center will make the identification and testing of mechanisms of dementia care interventions the priority, which will help facilitate and expedite the successful dissemination of promising innovations to benefit people living with dementia and those who care for them.”
The EMBRACE center will provide consultation, resources, and support to investigators who wish to progress towards larger scale and more rigorous testing of their trials. The center will also offer educational resources, workshops, and opportunities for researchers to advance the science of dementia care to close the gap between academic research and real-world, scalable interventions to support the millions of Americans living with ADRD and those who care for them. The project is a collaboration between SPH, the University of Wisconsin, Drexel University, and the University of Pennsylvania.
About the School of Public Health
The University of Minnesota School of Public Health improves the health and wellbeing of populations and communities around the world by bringing innovative research, learning, and concrete actions to today’s biggest health challenges. We prepare some of the most influential leaders in the field, and partner with health departments, communities, and policymakers to advance health equity for all. Learn more at sph.umn.edu.
