Geripal-podcast

The Covid epidemic laid bare two major structural issues.  First, Black and Latinx persons experienced much higher rates of mortality than other groups.  Second, as we discussed in last week’s podcast, older adults, particularly those in nursing homes, were far more likely to die than younger individuals.  These are structural issues because the fundamental causes of these issues were not biological issues, they were social.  These worse outcomes were not due to differences in genes, they are due to structural racism and ageism.  In today’s podcast we talk about the intersection of racism and ageism.  We use the Covid pandemic and lack of diversity in trials for recently approved Alzheimer’s drugs aducanumab and (to a lesser extent) lecanemab as springboards for discussion.  Our guests Tim Farrell, Ramona Rhodes, and Nancy Lunderbjerg wrote an article in JAGS on this issue, and Sharon Brangman wrote a separate JAGS article on the need to achieve diversity in study populations. In a third piece, Ramona Rh