Test taken by Colo. teens in 1960 started 58year study

Jeannie Druckenmiller remembers the first time she took the test. She was at her desk — the second seat from the front, in the middle row — in home room at the former Horace Mann Junior High School in Denver.

The test took multiple days. That she knows. But Druckenmiller can’t remember what year she took it — she attended the school from 1958 to 1960 — or what questions it asked. And she didn’t know what it was for.

What Druckenmiller didn’t — or, rather, couldn’t — know is that she was among more than 400,000 teenagers across the United States taking a test that would retroactively become a 58yearlong study of Alzheimer’s disease.

“I never got the impression in the beginning that it had anything to do with (Alzheimer’s),” Druckenmiller said. “Nobody talked about Alzheimer’s in 1959 or 1960. I don’t know if it even had a name then.”

The study, called Project Talent, initially was administered in 1960 to assess the aptitudes and abilities of high school students. Developed by the American Institutes for Research and funded by the U.S. Office of Education, it was used to identify the strengths and interests of teenagers and to guide them into careers that matched their talents. Followup studies focused on participants’ occupations, families, education and health.

The 1960 study tested students on a variety of things, including their ability to memorize words, and mechanical and abstract reasoning. For example, one sample question showed students a photo of a pulley system that had a bucket on one end and a ball on another. The question asked students which way the bucket would move when the ball goes up (Answer: Down).

Students were sent followup questionnaires until they were about 30 years old, but the study fell dormant until about 2010. It wasn’t until then that researchers realized the trove of information they had on almost half a million people could be used to look at aging — and specifically Alzheimer’s, which

is rapidly increasing.

Now the information that Druckenmiller and her peers have given researchers since 1960 is being paired with questionnaires they have filled out this year to identify predictors of Alzheimer’s.

The study, which is now being funded by the National Institutes of Health, is also looking to discover whether there are disparities based on race and ethnicity.

Druckenmiller, who is now 73 and lives in Madison, Wis., noticed the study’s healthrelated shift when she recently filled out a new questionnaire. She said it asked about mental and physical abilities, and included socioeconomic questions.

“I think Alzheimer’s provided them with a target they were searching for,” said Druckenmiller, whose mother, grandmother and aunt had dementia.

Alzheimer’s is a form of dementia that affects a person’s memory, thinking and behavior.

The disease is named after Dr. Alois Alzheimer, who in 1906 noticed changes in the brain tissue of a woman who died of an unusual mental illness.

But it wasn’t until the 1980s that the disease started to gain more awareness, with Congress selecting November as National Alzheimer’s Disease Month in 1983, according to the Alz heimer’s Association.

It’s estimated that 5.7 million Americans have Alzheimer’s, and that by 2050, the number will grow to 14 million, according to the Alzheimer’s Association.

The hope is that, through the study, researchers can identify early life predictors of dementia, and eventually, create a set of recommendations on how people can improve their memory, said Susan Lapham, director of Project Talent.

Researchers are collect ing data through December and plan to have results by November 2019.

They would like to get additional funding to continue following the study participants to learn more about when dementia sets in and the progression of aging, Lapham said.

She said researchers have located about 96 percent of the study’s original 400,000 participants. About 4,467 students from 13 schools in Colorado participated in the first study in 1960.

The test has taken on new significance for Druckenmiller, a former microbiologist, as she’s gotten older. Partly because she now knows what the data is being used for.

“It’s become much more important to me,” she said. “I’m glad I did it.”