Boundaries of Diversity in Clinical Trials

Cassie’s Custom-Design Major is titled “Neuroscience” and pulls from biology, psychology, and medical sociology. For her capstone project, she aims to show that geography and education levels in the United States are a few reasons for the lack of diversity within biomedical research. Cassie will utilize the resources provided by the National Library of Medicine (clinicaltrial.gov) to collect data on the location of clinical trial sites and calculate the Flesch Reading Ease Test and Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level Test of trial summaries from Alzheimer’s Disease treatment trials to compare to the prevalence of Alzheimer’s Disease and the reading abilities of an average person. These efforts are meant to highlight that certain individuals are underserved by biomedical research, due to the social determinants of health, which will lead to a lack of diversity in results collected by industry.