Digital efforts in Spanish for enrolling Latino adults in the Brain Health Registry

Previous culturally informed digital inclusion efforts in English effectively enrolled Latino adults into the Brain Health Registry (BHR), an online Alzheimer's disease (AD)-related registry. Because these efforts were in English only, we did not successfully reach individuals from the U.S. Latino community whose language preference is Spanish. The English-language effort had limited success enrolling Latino participants from diverse sociodemographic backgrounds (e.g., gender, education, nativity). Therefore, we tested the hypothesis that Spanish-language efforts would increase the sociodemographic diversity of enrolled Latino participants.

The BHR is an online registry that collects longitudinal cognitive and health data. We worked in partnership with a Latino Community Science Partnership Board to develop Spanish-language, culturally informed digital inclusion efforts, including a Spanish translation of BHR, Facebook advertisements, and culturally informed recruitment websites. Here, we (1) report on the Spanish-language digital advertisement results, (2) compare the characteristics of participants enrolled through Spanish (July 2021 through June 2022) versus English (September 2020 to June 2022) advertisements, and (3) compare the characteristics of those using the BHR assessment portal in Spanish versus in English.

Culturally informed Spanish-language advertisements enrolled 1059 participants, including 986 who identify as Latino. Compared to participants enrolled through culturally informed English-language efforts (N = 6985), participants enrolled via Spanish-language efforts were significantly older, had less education, and had a higher percentage of male participants and those born outside the United States. Compared to participants who opted to use the BHR website in English (N = 37,199), those who opted to use the website in Spanish (n = 1088), were significantly younger, reported fewer years of education, and more frequently self-identified as male and Latino. However, these efforts failed to increase BHR task completion.

Culturally informed digital efforts in Spanish are effective at increasing sociodemographic diversity of a Latino, digital research cohort. Similar efforts can be adapted to other studies and settings to improve the generalizability of AD research.

Implemented culturally informed, Spanish-language digital enrollment efforts.The efforts enrolled 986 Latino individuals in 12 months.Compared demographics of those enrolled through Spanish versus English advertising.Spanish efforts increased enrollment of older Latino adults born outside the United States.Efforts increased enrollment but did not increase completion of study tasks.