Henderson State-Of-The-Art Lecture: Collaborating With Other Specialties to Include Clinical Trial Outcomes Important to Older Adults

Speaker: Jeff D. Williamson, MD, MHS

Forty-five years ago, Dr Jim Fries published a landmark concept article in the New England Journal of Medicine entitled "Aging, Natural Death, and the Compression of Morbidity." It was controversial to many at the time. Dr. Williamson’s primary mentor, Dr. Linda Fried, reviewed this article with him over lunch just a few years after it was published in his first year as a geriatric medicine and gerontology fellow at Johns Hopkins. She recommended he think of it as a framework for his academic career when doing research, teaching, or providing clinical care. The fruit of Drs. Fries's work and Fried's advice culminated, for Dr. Williamson, in the work that he and his colleagues completed as part of the SPRINT and SPRINT MIND clinical trial. This will be the focus of the Henderson Lecture. Learning objectives: (1) explain the role of interdisciplinary collaboration in designing and conducting clinical trials that reflect outcomes meaningful to older adults; (2) analyze the findings and implications of the SPRINT and SPRINT MIND trials, particularly in relation to cognitive and functional outcomes in older populations; (3) integrate geriatric-specific outcomes into clinical trial design and everyday clinical practice to better serve the aging population.