Despite the progress in including older adults in clinical research, enhancing adherence to behavioral and pharmacological interventions in clinical research on older adults remains a difficult task. Poor adherence jeopardizes the validity of clinical research outcomes and can consume large amounts of resources, especially, large prevention trials. To address this difficulty, the applicant proposes a small, working conference designed to provide investigators, striving daily to meet the challenges of adherence in clinical research with older adults, an opportunity to discuss the issues and problems they encounter, and to devise solutions to these problems. Results of the meeting will be disseminated to a wide audience of researchers via a supplemental journal issue. The conference will provide sessions which give an overview of adherence in older adults, outline the predictors and methodological issues of adherence in this population, provide contextual descriptions which affect adherence including intra-population variability related to gender, socioeconomic status, ethnicity, and age, and suggest strategies to enhance adherence. New issues will emerge and novel strategies will be crafted from working groups of leaders in the field. A poster session will highlight the most recent advances in theory, methodology, and research on adherence in older populations. Awards will be given to the top student and junior faculty submissions. This conference is unique in that its population is specific, older adults, but its scope within that population deals with a multi-disciplinary examination of adherence in dietary, exercise and pharmacologic interventions. By presenting research and theory used in each intervention type in the same symposium, it is anticipated that researchers will benefit from strategies used in other areas, and be able to devise successful interventions to improve adherence in clinical research.

R13AG016229

1998-09-30

1999-09-29