One of the longest-running studies of Alzheimer’s disease in the United States has been funded for another five years. WashU Medicine in St. Louis announced on November 10, 2026 that the National Institute on Aging, part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), renewed its Healthy Aging and Senile Dementia program with $32 million over five years1. The money will carry the study through 2031, which will be its 45th year1.
The renewal comes with two new aims. The team plans to bring a mobile clinic into St. Louis neighborhoods to enroll 300 new volunteers, and to follow how patients respond to newly available Alzheimer’s treatments in everyday medical care1. This is news about funding and plans. The announcement does not report new findings.
What happened
According to WashU Medicine, the renewed grant will let investigators focus more on preventing Alzheimer’s and on enrolling a wider range of participants1. The study has enrolled more than 1,877 people since it began1.
John C. Morris, a neurology professor who has led the program since 1998, described how the research has changed over the decades:
“Forty years ago, we couldn’t confirm Alzheimer’s until after death, when the brain was studied under the microscope,”1
He said that because volunteers came back year after year and across generations, researchers learned that the disease “starts silently in the brain long before memory fails,” and that the goal now is to stop it before brain cells die1.
A study that began in the 1970s
The program traces back to Leonard Berg, a neurologist at Washington University School of Medicine. In the 1970s he noticed memory problems among his older patients and, according to the university, refused to dismiss them as “normal aging” or senility1. The study is a longitudinal one, meaning it follows the same people over many years rather than taking a single snapshot1.
The program’s early funding helped Berg and colleagues set up the Alzheimer Disease Research Center at WashU in 1985, one of the first 10 such centers in the country1. It was later endowed by Charles F. and Joanne Knight and is now called the Knight ADRC1. The university credits the center with the Clinical Dementia Rating, a scale developed by Berg and colleagues and refined by Morris, which it says is now the worldwide standard for judging whether dementia is present and how severe it is1.
Work by Morris and colleagues showing that Alzheimer’s-related brain changes can appear in people with no memory symptoms led, in 2005, to the Adult Children Study1. That study follows middle-aged people who had a parent with Alzheimer’s, to work out who is likely to develop the disease and what triggers symptoms1.
Who takes part, and why that is changing
Like most clinical research, the study has historically drawn mostly white, highly educated volunteers in good overall health, the university said1. Since 1998, the share of Black participants has risen from 3% to 17%1.
With the new money, the team will look at whether some biomarkers of Alzheimer’s (measurable signs of the disease, for example in blood) differ between Black and white participants1. If they do, the university said, that would suggest tools used to diagnose the disease may not work equally well across racial groups1.
To reach more people, the team aims to expand a pilot that enrolled about 40 participants in north St. Louis into a group of 300 people with varied education, income levels and health histories1. A mobile clinic will collect information, blood and other tissue samples in neighborhoods, and volunteers can be connected to health services if they need them1.
“A long history of mistrust in medical institutions as well as practical issues such as absence of transportation have discouraged many community members from participating in research at our medical center, so we’re taking the research to the community,”1
Morris said. Nicole Garrison, a pharmacist and study participant, said in the announcement that she takes part “for my daughters, for families like mine, and as a Black woman who knows representation matters”1.
Following new drugs outside trials
The second aim is to track how patients who get newly available Alzheimer’s treatments in regular clinics, not research settings, respond to them1. WashU Medicine described these therapies as ones that “have been shown to slow Alzheimer’s progression in some people,” and said the goal is to learn their real-world impact outside the controlled setting of clinical trials1. One of these drugs, lecanemab, sold as Leqembi, was approved by the US Food and Drug Administration in January 20232.
Real-world tracking can show things trials may miss, because trial volunteers are often screened more strictly than typical patients. The NIH itself has noted that many older people with dementia have several kinds of brain damage at once, such as blood-vessel changes or Lewy bodies alongside Alzheimer’s plaques, and that treatments aimed at clearing amyloid plaques may be less effective when those other problems are present3. The WashU announcement does not say how many treated patients the study will follow or which outcomes it will measure.
What this does not show yet
The renewal is a decision to fund planned work. It does not show that the mobile clinic will reach its goal of 300 people, that Alzheimer’s markers actually differ between groups, or how well new drugs perform in everyday care. Those are open questions the study is set up to examine1.
Observational studies like this one record what happens to people over time. They can reveal patterns and early warning signs, but on their own they cannot prove that one thing causes another. The figures here, including the enrollment count and the change in Black participation, come from the university’s own announcement and have not been checked by an outside group.
Who is behind it
The funding comes from the National Institute on Aging, a branch of the NIH1. The Knight ADRC was endowed by private donors Charles F. and Joanne Knight1. The announcement was written and published by WashU Medicine, the institution running the study, and it does not describe any company ties or conflicts of interest for the program1.
WashU’s medical school has a large stake in this field. Its dean said in 2024 that the school ranked first among US medical schools in NIH funding for neurology research2.
How it fits, and what to watch next
WashU is not the only Alzheimer’s center getting renewed federal support. In September 2026, the Cleveland Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center, described as Ohio’s only such center, announced renewed support from the National Institute on Aging4. The institute also funds efforts to study dementia care inside ordinary health systems; its IMPACT Collaboratory, set up in 2019, supports trials of non-drug approaches carried out within health care systems5.
Things to watch in this thread:
