In the whitewashed world of Alzheimer’s research, one scientist is on a quest to understand the diversity of brains
Lisa Barnes runs one of the nation’s largest studies of Alzheimer’s disease focused exclusively on Black people and has created a brain bank.
CHICAGO — When she entered the field of Alzheimer’s research a quarter century ago, Lisa Barnes was deeply disappointed to find few Black people like her family members with dementia were being studied. A rarity herself — as a Black female cognitive neuropsychologist — she’s spent her career quietly pushing back.
Since 2004, Barnes has been running the Minority Aging Research Study, one of the nation’s largest studies of Alzheimer’s focused exclusively on Black people and has created a brain bank used by other researchers to understand the illness in this population. This was no easy feat, given that many of the people she hoped to study grew up amid Jim Crow laws and often held a deep mistrust of medical science and its experiments.
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