After the success of a public service advertisement campaign aimed at improving recognition of the early signs of Alzheimer’s disease in Hispanic and Latino communities, the Alzheimer’s Association is expanding the campaign’s reach to another group disproportionately affected by the disease.
The newest “Some Things Come With Age” installment centers on Black Americans, who are nearly twice as likely as white Americans to be diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, the organization said in a launch announcement Thursday.
The full-length PSA follows a Black family throughout several decades, as its matriarch grows older and more forgetful. When her children are young, she teaches them to make her specialty dessert, a sweet potato pie; later, she’s shown forgetting the name of the root vegetable and adding copious amounts of salt instead of sugar to the pie.
After the latter incident, her son tells his child, “Grandma’s just getting old. Some things come with age,” to which his sister replies, “And some don’t.” They go on to sit down with their mother to express their concerns and set up a doctor’s appointment, as a voice-over notes, “Early detection of Alzheimer’s can lead to better care for your loved one.”
At the end of the three-and-a-half-minute video, the woman is shown making a sweet potato pie with her granddaughter, recipe in hand. The on-screen text directs viewers to a page on the Alzheimer’s Association website that lists 10 early signs and symptoms of the disease, plus a table contrasting those signifiers with a handful of “typical age-related changes.”
“Black Americans face a higher risk of Alzheimer’s disease and are often diagnosed later in the disease’s progression,” Katie Evans, chief programs and mission engagement officer for the Alzheimer's Association, said in the release.
“This campaign encourages families to initiate conversations sooner when they notice potential signs of Alzheimer’s or another dementia,” Evans continued. “Early detection and diagnosis provide the best opportunity for care, management and treatment of the disease.”
The PSA is a collaboration between the association and the Ad Council and was created and produced for free by the agency VML.
The video will go out in several different cuts—the Ad Council’s YouTube page features six-, 15-, 30- and 60-second iterations of the film—as well as in radio format, all via donated slots from media companies like Meta, SiriusXM, The New York Times and more.
The Some Things Come With Age campaign first launched in the summer of 2023 with PSAs in both English and Spanish to reach Hispanic Americans, who are an estimated 1.5 times more likely than non-Hispanic white Americans to develop Alzheimer’s.
This week’s announcement included the results of Ad Council research from late 2024 showing that people who were aware of the campaign were about three times more likely than those unfamiliar with the PSAs to say they knew the difference between signs of aging and signs of dementia.