Brain Health Registry gets a boost

The Brain Health Registry has partnered with the Global Alzheimer’s Platform Foundation to add tens of thousands of new people to the registry’s database to support Alzheimer’s research. Under the joint effort, supporters hope to have 40,000 people registered before the end of 2016.

The Brain Health Registry, founded and maintained by the University of California–San Francisco, is a global online registry of volunteers who are taking part in data-gathering to uncover new clues about Alzheimer’s disease and how to treat it.

As with any large-scale data registry project, the bigger the database, the better researchers can spot possible patterns and hone clinical trials to decipher the disease. Since an important part of the goal is to learn more about how Alzheimer’s begins to develop, the registry needs plenty of healthy people exhibiting no signs of memory loss, too.

“This joint effort represents exciting progress in building a faster pathway to finding a treatment for Alzheimer’s disease by 2025,” Said George Vradenburg, chairman of the Global Alzheimer’s Platform Foundation, founded in 2013 as a clinical trial platform. “The cost of bringing an effective Alzheimer’s treatment to market is nearly three times the industry average for drug development. [We envision] not just a national, but a global pool of people and research trial sites standing ready to launch clinical trials around the world, thus greatly reducing the cost and time it takes to bring these promising treatments to market.”

The Brain Health Registry also plans to launch an investigator portal on the site to link researchers with data and to give scientists efficient ways to recruit clinical trial candidates.

Several celebrities also have joined the effort encouraging people to register. Actors Linda Gray and Samantha Harris and author B. Smith have appeared in public service announcements encouraging people to enroll.

Enrolling in the Brain Health Registry is free (www.brainhealthregistry.org).

Pamela Tabar

Pamela Tabar was editor-in-chief of I Advance Senior Care from 2013-2018. She has worked as a writer and editor for healthcare business media since 1998, including as News Editor of Healthcare Informatics. She has a master’s degree in journalism from Kent State University and a master’s degree in English from the University of York, England.