==== Front
Innov Aging
Innov Aging
innovateage
Innovation in Aging
2399-5300 Oxford University Press US 

10.1093/geroni/igaa057.1964
igaa057.1964
Abstracts
Session 5570 (Symposium)
AcademicSubjects/SOC02600
Increasing Physical Activity and Reducing Dementia Risk in Older African American Residents of Public Housing
Fausto Bernadette 1 Duberstein Paul 2 Lu Shou-En 2 Gluck Mark 1 1 
Rutgers University, Newark, New Jersey, United States
2 
Rutgers University School of Public Health, Piscataway, New Jersey, United States
2020 
16 12 2020 
16 12 2020 
4 Suppl 1 Program Abstracts from The GSA 2020 Annual Scientific Meeting “Turning 75: Why Age Matters”587 587
© The Author(s) 2020. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Gerontological Society of America.2020This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.Abstract
Older African Americans—especially those with lower income and those living in urban public housing—have a greater risk of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) compared to the general population. Inadequate levels of physical activity and aerobic exercise are thought to be among the probable causes for increased AD risk. Based on our preliminary data, we hypothesize that a cluster-randomized multi-level intervention in low-income public housing, focused on heart and brain health, can produce participant-level increases in physical activity among participants enrolled in an aerobic exercise class after six months (primary outcome) that are maintained at one year, as well as housing-level changes in attitudes and beliefs about physical activity and exercise participation among housing residents, both exposed and not exposed to the participant-level intervention as well as participant-level improvements in cognition and brain health evincive of decreased risk for AD.