Successful Recruitment of Centenarians for Post-Mortem Brain Donation: Results from the Georgia Centenarian Study.

Abstract

Brain donation and neuropathological examination of brain tissues is the only way to obtain definitive diagnostic information on research subjects enrolled in aging studies. We investigated predictors of brain donation in a population-based study of centenarians in Phase III of the Georgia Centenarian Study (GCS). Sixty-six individuals (mean age = 100.6 years, 91% female, 20% African American) were successfully recruited from the core sample of 244 individuals residing in 44 counties of Northeast Georgia to provide brain donation. Bivariate (t-tests, chi-square tests) and multivariate analyses (logistic regression) showed no significant differences between donors and non-donors across a wide range of demographic, religious, personality, cognitive and physical functioning characteristics. We succeeded in recruiting a diverse, population-based sample of centenarians for brain donation. Our findings also suggest that barriers to brain donation reported in other studies may have less impact in these exceptional survivors.