September 16, 2024

Drexel’s College of Nursing and Health Professions will collaborate on the new EMBRACE center at the University of Minnesota School of Public Health that will focus on identifying and testing what makes dementia interventions work to adapt them successfully in a variety of care settings.

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, in collaboration with Drexel University, the University of Wisconsin and the University of Pennsylvania, 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. One of the trials in the grant’s first year will focus on cognitive behavioral support for family members caring for those with dementia and tailors it to people in the African immigrant community.

At Drexel, the grant will set up an infrastructure to support behavioral intervention studies to improve the lives of people living with dementia and their caregivers. Drexel will support a national call for pilot studies, along with a mentorship and consultation program to ensure their success in advancing the interventions from idea inception, to understanding mechanisms of action to implementation and dissemination.

Laura N. Gitlin, PhD, Distinguished University Professor and dean emerita in Drexel’s College of Nursing and Health Professions, will co-direct the Behavioral Intervention Development Core, one of the two cores that make up this grant program.

“The EMBRACE Roybal Center will support research to advance dementia care and improve quality of life of individuals living with dementia and their caregivers. As a co-investigator on this important grant and co-director of its Behavioral Intervention Development Core, I am thrilled to be able to work with others nationally and support pilot research efforts to move the field dramatically forward with replicable, effective and implementable approaches for families living with dementia.”

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.