ABSTRACT
In 2011, the leading US American Alzheimer’s advocacy group, the Alzheimer’s Association, launched a campaign for ‘A world free of Alzheimer’s’. 2 The Alzheimer’s Association supports academic research with grants of up to ten million US dollars per year for research, particularly in the fi elds of biomedicine and the neurosciences. On its website it offers a ‘fi nd-a-clinical-trial’ database to encourage its members and visitors – mostly family members and sometimes patients themselves – to become engaged with biomedicine. In contrast, the leading German Alzheimer’s advocacy group Deutsche Alzheimer Gesellschaft e.V. 3 provides grants mainly for integrative care or psycho-social research. On its website, it provides position papers and statements 4 problematizing the involvement of Alzheimer’s patients in research and clinical trials – especially if it is third-party research, which means there is no individual benefi t to a research participant or this is very unlikely.
