The planned opening of a brand-new, 3,100-square-foot building at North Carolina A&T State University later this year will mark another milestone in A&T’s role as lead research site for the first and largest study of Alzheimer’s disease among Blacks.
This state-of-the-art facility will house Dr. Goldie Byrd—lead investigator of the African Americans Alzheimer’s Disease Study and Nathan F. Simms Endowed professor of biology at A&T—and her research team and other support staff. This study aims to discover why Alzheimer’s strikes Blacks more than any other racial group in the United States. Researchers from A&T and three other colleges—the University of Miami, Vanderbilt University and Columbia University—aspire to enroll 7,000 volunteers in their groundbreaking effort. So far, 1,620 have signed up, a far cry from the few dozen Black volunteers who signed up for the study when it was housed at Duke University until moved to historically Black A&T in 2003.
Duke University has seen its share of race-based turmoil in the years following the decision by university leaders to end Duke’s all-White admissions policy in 1961. In 1968, Black students, concerned about their on-campus civil rights and non-academic worker wages, staged a takeover of Duke offices that resulted in a pay raise for Black cafeteria, grounds and other service workers, but a year-long academic probation for the protesters. Last year, Duke made headlines when Black students protested an unpublished study by Duke researchers that said Blacks were able to match the GPA of Whites over time by switching to less rigorous majors.
Such instances remain on the minds of Black North Carolinians of a certain sensibility and age that the Alzheimer’s study targets, explains Byrd.
“People remember when they couldn’t come to Duke and get good medical care,” Byrd told journalists at a health disparities conference in Washington, D.C., earlier this year. “Duke had 7,000 blood samples by 2003, but only 43 of them were from Black people.”
Byrd arrived at A&T in 2003 as chair of the Department of Biology. That same year, she completed a sabbatical at the Duke Center for Human Genetics where she and her collaborators helped initiate the Alzheimer’s study. Byrd, who is dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, hopes to identify specific genes in African-American patients with Alzheimer’s to understand why the population is more susceptible to the disease. Alzheimer’s occurs twice as often in Blacks as in Whites. The disease, which is the most common form of dementia, occurs 1.5 times more frequently in Blacks than in Latinos.