We’ve heard on The Show before that minorities are often excluded from clinical trials, which can lead to inequities in their health care treatment — but that unequal representation also extends to older adults.
Even though older people are often the ones who need the kinds of treatments tested in clinical trials, they are rarely the people involved in testing them. This happens for a slew of reasons but, last December, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) issued new policy guidelines for the research it funds.
With these new policies, grant applicants are required to explain how they plan to include people of all ages in their studies and, if they’re not, they’ll have to provide acceptable justifications for any group that’s left out.
For more on this, The Show talked to Susan Peschin, the president of the Alliance for Aging Research.