Alzheimer's Association Awarded NIH Grant for Psychosocial Dementia Care Research

The U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) has allocated $1.34 million to the Alzheimer's Association to fortify the current framework for psychosocial investigations looking into care for people with dementia and their caregivers, reports News-Medical . The five-year project seeks to widen the scope of scientific interest and involvement in psychosocial dementia care research, and strengthen the research framework. "This research will develop a framework that defines evidence-based measures and encourages use more consistently to accelerate knowledge, understanding, and application of care strategies that improve the quality of life," said the Alzheimer's Association's Sam Fazio. The initiative's planned goals include examining current measures being used in dementia care research; promoting development of new evidence-based measures and tools to span gaps in research; enabling wider dissemination, adoption, and deployment of these measures and care tools in future research; and broadening current measures that often solely focus on decline and impairment, to be more comprehensive. The Alzheimer's Association will engage a multidisciplinary group of dementia care researchers, care and support specialists, caregivers, and individuals living with dementia.