How the APA-NIH Conference Came About

Almost five years ago, an African-American patient came to Jacobo Mintzer, M.D., and asked whether Alzheimer’s drugs on the market would work on people of color, like him. “You know what, I don’t know,” said Mintzer, a professor of psychiatry and a director of geriatric psychiatry at the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston and a consultant to and past chair of APA’s Committee on Ethnic Minority Elderly. Another African-American patient asked him whether testing for the gene known to increase Alzheimer’s susceptibility in the general population—the so-called E4 variant of the APOE gene—would work in African Americans. Mintzer again confessed that he didn’t know.

Mintzer checked with the “pros” at the National Institutes of Health and found out that they didn’t have the answers either. So he decided that a conference focused on Alzheimer’s, genetics, and minorities—especially African Americans—might be very much in order.

Mintzer then approached Lindsay Farrer, Ph.D., a professor of neurology and chief of the genetics program at Boston University some 15 months ago and suggested the idea. Farrer was enthusiastic about it, as were a number of other top scientists in academia and industry. A conference program was fleshed out some four months ago; APA, the National Institute of Mental Health, and the National Institute on Aging agreed to serve as cosponsors. The conference took place on December 2 and 3 in the Clinical Center of the NIH in Bethesda, Md.

In addition to Mintzer, APA Medical Director Steven Mirin, M.D., and APA President-elect Richard Harding, M.D., were present to welcome the conference participants. Mirin thanked Mintzer for his vision of holding the conference and the NIMH and NIA for helping sponsor it. He also thanked the conference participants for coming together to share research results on the subject and to try to reach a consensus on where research on the subject should be headed. Harding brought greetings to conference participants from the APA Board of Trustees and pointed out that APA, as the oldest medical specialty society in the United States, has always sought to improve the mental health of all Americans. “APA is proud to sponsor this conference,” he declared.

Kenneth Sakauye, M.D., chair of the APA Council on Aging, and Josepha Cheong, M.D., chair of the APA Committee on Ethnic Minority Elderly, also spoke at the conference. Darrel Regier, M.D., executive director of the American Psychiatric Institute for Research and Education and director of the APA Office of Research, participated in the conference.

After the conference ended, Mintzer and Regier met with some of the conference scientists to draw up a consensus report on where research on the subject should head next. “We look forward to receiving the consensus document, which we will publish in our literature,” Harding said.