Religious participation is associated with fewer dementia diagnoses among Black people in the United States.

INTRODUCTION: Black people had the highest prevalence of Alzheimer's disease and related dementias (ADRD) of any racial/ethnic group in the United States (US) as of 2020. As racial disparities in the prevalence of ADRD are being investigated, more evidence is necessary to determine the pathways and mechanisms that either slow ADRD progression or improve quality of life for those affected. Religion/spirituality (R/S) has been shown to affect health outcomes but has rarely been studied as a possible pathway for reducing ADRD risk. Crucially, Black people also report higher levels of R/S than other racial/ethnic groups in the United States. This research asks if R/S affects ADRD risk among Black adults and if any effects persist after controlling for hypertension. METHODS: We conducted a secondary data analysis drawing from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS), a nationally representative longitudinal dataset with an oversampling of Black adults. RESULTS: We used logistic regression analysis to demonstrate how R/S has an ameliorating impact on ADRD risk among Black people, even after controlling for hypertension. Those who never attended religious services had 2.37 higher odds of being diagnosed with ADRD than those who attended more than once a week. Further, as R/S attendance increased, ADRD risk decreased linearly. CONCLUSION: These findings demonstrate the importance that existing cultural networks (e.g., R/S) can have for reducing ADRD burden for Black people and has important implications for the role of R/S in shaping ADRD symptomatology.

Emotion Regulation Use Varies Across Socioecological Levels of Pandemic Stress in Older Adults.

OBJECTIVES: COVID-19 escalated stress within family/neighborhood (local) and national/cultural (global) levels. However, the impact of socioecological levels of stress on pandemic emotion regulation remains largely unexplored. METHODS: Thirty older adults from the Northeast US (63-92 years) reported on pandemic stress and emotion regulation in semi-structured interviews. Responses were coded into socioecological sources of local and global stress, and associated use of cognitive emotion regulation strategies from the Cognitive Emotion Regulation Questionnaire was explored. RESULTS: Older adults experienced significant distress at global levels, and perception of lacking top-down safety governance may have exacerbated local distress of engaging in daily activities during the COVID-19 pandemic. Participants endorsed coping with local stressors via perspective-taking, acceptance, and other adaptive strategies, while global sources of stress were associated with greater use of maladaptive strategies, including other-blame and rumination. CONCLUSION: Quantitative assessments may underestimate significant older adult distress and maladaptive coping toward global stressors. Findings should be replicated with more diverse populations beyond the COVID-19 context.

Community-Engaged Recommendations for Empowering People Living With Dementia to be Research Collaborators.

As cases of Alzheimer's disease and related dementias (ADRD) increase worldwide, research design has placed additional emphasis on social and behavioral factors that affect ADRD symptomatology and quality of life. Despite this, few studies have incorporated people living with ADRD as research partners. We propose 5 community-engaged recommendations for incorporating people living with ADRD into future research as full collaborators. The proposed recommendations center the experiences of people living with ADRD as crucial contributions to scientific inquiry. The guidelines are based on experiences at a 2-day "Empowering Partnerships" workshop in 2019; post workshop activity continued through 2021 with ongoing collaborations, analysis, and reflective practice. The workshop and subsequent conversations engaged a network of people living with ADRD, informal carepartners, and researchers to collectively build their capacities to partner in all aspects of person-centered research. To empower people living with ADRD as research partners, we recommend that research teams (a) create a flexible schedule of communication and/or meetings to accommodate a wide range of ADRD symptoms, (b) generate team-specific communication strategies/guidelines, (c) incorporate lived experiences of people living with ADRD into research protocols, (d) involve people living with ADRD in all aspects of a project, beginning in the developmental stages, and (e) incorporate skilled facilitators to facilitate communication between stakeholder groups. This multi-vocal approach to research will diversify ADRD research and ensure that projects align with the priorities and capacities of principal stakeholders by incorporating individuals with a wide range of cognitive capabilities that more fully represent the diversity of ADRD experiences.