Recruitment and Retention Strategies for Clinical Trials in Alzheimer’s Disease

Recruitment for clinical trials is challenging for any disease but is particularly so for Alzheimer’s disease (AD). In the past three years, our site has recruited almost 600 subjects into our AD primary prevention and treatment trials, and diagnostic studies. In this article, we describe which strategies have had the best yield and which have had a modest or low yield. High yield is loosely defined as any recruitment activity that yields a high number of interested or eligible participants per the expense or time/staff invested in the recruitment effort. For example, a high-yield recruitment strategy is direct mailings for primary prevention trials. Low yield is defined as any recruitment activity that yields a low number of interested or eligible participants per the expense or time/staff invested in the recruitment effort. For example, direct mailing to physicians generally does not yield many subjects. Recruitment for primary prevention trials and treatment trials differ in approach. Recruitment of subjects is much more expensive than previously reported in the literature. It is important to build this expense into budgets. Subjects that do not qualify for their desired study may be candidates for other studies. Minority recruitment presents unique challenges above and beyond the overall challenges of successful recruitment in to AD clinical trials.