Recruitment of the elderly into a pharmacologic prevention trial: the Ginkgo Evaluation of Memory Study experience.

The difficulty involved in recruiting healthy older adults into clinical trials, especially those involving pharmacologic agents, is an important issue in research. The Ginkgo Evaluation of Memory (GEM) Study, a double-blind, placebo-controlled randomized clinical trial evaluating Ginkgo biloba to prevent dementia, successfully recruited 3072 participants age 75 years and older at four U.S.