Minority Gateway Satellite Clinic, 217 Elm Tree Lane in Lexington, evaluates and follows minorities with or without memory and thinking problems and provides culturally sensitive care to patients and support to families.
Established in 2001, the Minority Gateway Clinic is a clinical core satellite promoting the involvement of blacks in aging and dementia research in the UK-ADC. It represents a special “Gateway” for blacks to access clinical research endeavors.
The clinic’s immediate goal is to recruit and follow elderly blacks from intact cognition through intermediate states to dementia, focusing on the unique risk factor profiles in these participants that may contribute to cognitive transitions across the cognitive continuum.
Involvement of blacks in research is important because it is impossible to know whether research results will apply broadly to public health without such participation. Specifically, in age-related illnesses such as Alzheimer’s disease, we have to know whether genetic, biologic, cultural or socioeconomic differences between identifiable groups modify the risks and responses to interventions that are now appearing on the horizon for these diseases, in order to make these interventions most effective for each group.
For more information on the clinic or a normal aging study, phone (859) 323-5550.