Former Colorado Students Participate in a 58-Year Alzheimer's Disease Study

Jeannie Druckenmiller remembers the first time she took the test. She was at her desk – the second seat in front, in the middle of the row – in the same class as the former Horace Mann High School in Denver.

The test took several days. That she knows. But Druckenmiller can not remember what year she took it – she went to school from 1958 to 1960 – or questions she asked. And she did not know what it was for.

What Druckenmiller did not know or could not know was that she was one of more than 400,000 teenagers in the United States who were going through a test that would retroactively become an Alzheimer's study of a lifetime. 58 years old.

"At first, I never felt it had anything to do with Alzheimer's disease," Druckenmiller said. "Nobody talked about Alzheimer's in 1959 or 1960. I do not know if she even had a name at that time."

The study, titled Project Talent, was originally conducted in 1960 to assess the skills and abilities of high school students. Developed by the US Institutes for Research and funded by the US Office of Education, it has been used to identify the strengths and interests of adolescents and to guide them in careers that live up to their talents. Follow-up studies focused on occupations, family, education and participant health.

The 1960 study tested students on a variety of things, including their ability to memorize words, and mechanical and abstract reasoning. For example, an example of a question showed students a picture of a system of pulleys with a bucket at one end and a ball at the other. The question asked the students how the bucket would move when the ball came up (answer: bottom).

Follow-up questionnaires were sent to students until about age 30, but the study remained dormant until 2010. That's when researchers realized that information about half a million people could be used for aging – and especially for Alzheimer's disease, which is growing rapidly.

Now, the information that Druckenmiller and his peers have provided to researchers since 1960 is paired with questionnaires they completed this year to identify the predictors of Alzheimer's disease. The study, currently funded by the National Institutes of Health, also seeks to determine whether there are disparities based on race and ethnicity.

Druckenmiller, now 73 years old and living in Madison, Wisconsin, noticed the change in the health of the study when she recently completed a new questionnaire. She added that the document focused on mental and physical abilities and included socio-economic issues.

"I think Alzheimer's provided them with the target they were looking for," said Druckenmiller, whose mother, grandmother and aunt had dementia.

Alzheimer's disease is a form of dementia that affects a person's memory, thinking and behavior. The disease is named after Dr. Alois Alzheimer, who in 1906 noticed changes in the brain tissue of a woman who died as a result of an unusual mental illness. But it was not until the 1980s that the disease began to get more awareness, with the Congress designating November as National Alzheimer's Month in 1983, according to the Alzheimer's Association.

According to the Alzheimer's Association, it is estimated that 5.7 million Americans have Alzheimer's disease and by 2050 this number will rise to 14 million.

The hope is that through this study, researchers can identify predictors of dementia in their infancy and eventually create a set of recommendations on how people can improve their memory, said Susan Lapham, Project Director. Talent.