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NeuroVoices: Brad Kamitaki, MD, on Aiming to Improve Dementia Care in Asian and Pacific American Communities
The assistant professor of neurology at Robert Wood Johnson Medical School discussed the mission of RCASIA, highlights from its annual retreat, and key takeaways from AAN 2025.
Brad Kamitaki, MD
(Credit: Rutgers)
The population of Asian Americans in the United States is increasing rapidly, with research showing that the number of adults aged 65 and older in the New York City metropolitan area grew by over 70% since 2012.1 Research has also shown that Alzheimer disease (AD) and related dementias are among the leading causes of death in older Asian American adults. However, recent data may not fully reflect the scope of the issue, in part because of reported challenges such as underdiagnosis, cultural and linguistic differences, and methodological limitations in data collection.
Although research efforts in Asia have begun to inform understanding of brain health among Asian American populations, notable gaps remain. Factors such as immigration history, acculturation, stigma, and environmental context may influence dementia outcomes and are not always accounted for in research. Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders, who are sometimes included in broader Asian American classifications, experience their own set of health challenges. Variation in subgroup classification, limited outreach, and inconsistent representation in national datasets have contributed to a limited evidence base for these populations.
The Resource Center for Alzheimer's and Dementia Research in Asian and Pacific Americans (RCASIA), based at the Rutgers Institute for Health, conducts research aimed at expanding knowledge of AD and related dementias in these patient communities.2 In a recent conversation, Brad Kamitaki, MD, assistant professor of neurology at Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, described the center’s goals and recent activities, including a retreat focused on cross-disciplinary collaboration and discussed emerging developments in neurology presented at 2025 American Academy of Neurology (AAN) Annual Meeting, held April 5–9 in San Diego, California.
NeurologyLive: What is RCASIA at Rutgers Institute for Health, Health Care Policy and Aging Research?
Brad Kamitaki, MD: RCASIA is a scholarly group or a group of scientists. Based at NYU and Rutgers, we are focused on how we can broadly improve healthcare for Asian and Pacific Islander Americans with Alzheimer dementia. This could include a lot of different types of work, including community-based research. We're focused on serving those communities, figuring out what needs they have and addressing them, trying to make the disparities we see better.
I'm one of the pilot scientists doing a project for RCASIA. I'm mentored by someone at the Institute for Health at Rutgers, but also by a lot of mentors in RCASIA like dementia specialist William T. Hu, MD, PhD, FAAN, interim director of the Center for Healthy Aging at the Rutgers Institute for Health, and many others. We have different arms in RCASIA. There's a research arm, a community engagement arm, and we also have community members from various organizations supporting Asian and Pacific Americans. It's all about making sure their voices are heard in the work we're doing.
Discuss more about the recent annual retreat with RCASIA, what did attendees get out of it?
It was held this past January at NYU. It was a great retreat. We had scientists, clinicians, a lot of students from Rutgers and NYU, research associates, as well as community members and our mentors. We all came together. Part of it was updating each other on what we’ve been doing with our projects and how far we’ve gotten with them but also learning from the different cores. We learned about research techniques and community engagement techniques.
What I thought was great was the keynote speakers. One of them was Richard Lui, who's a news anchor for MSNBC. He said, “I’m not a clinician or a scientist at all,” but he’s made documentaries about his father, who has Alzheimer disease, and about the caregiving aspect like how we support caregivers in America, especially as the population gets older. So how do we take care of our elders, with a focus on dementia, because that was his dad’s case. That was really inspiring to hear.
We also had presentations from outside scientists. It was all focused on Asian and Pacific Americans with Alzheimer dementia. People from a lot of different fields focused on that project at the retreat and it was great.
What was your experience this year at the 2025 AAN Annual Meeting?
I usually like going every year. This year was great because it was in San Diego, so the weather was nice. My husband grew up there, and his mom still lives there, so I got to bring my daughter. The social aspect was fun; it was a great place to visit. But I like going every year to AAN.
I subspecialize in epilepsy, and we have our own conference with the American Epilepsy Society, so this is a great opportunity for me to go to other talks in different areas and try to keep up. There's so much going on in neurology. Even though I finished residency less than 10 years ago, I feel like there are just so many advances that it’s hard to keep up. So, the meeting is a good opportunity to sit down and hear from people in other areas about what they’re doing.
Just like with RCASIA, it’s great to hear from people in other fields and how they’re tackling problems. I really like going to the big sessions to hear about the major advances in other fields. In my work at RCASIA and Rutgers, I also like learning about diversity initiatives and equity work, which is a big part of AAN, too. As an educator, I also focus on how we can become better educators for medical students and residents. So those are talks I usually like to attend as well.
What would you say were some of the hot, trending topics in neurology at the meeting—any that you found really interesting and want to follow up on?
There’s so much like I said but some of the things that stuck out for me included a clinical trial on a monoclonal antibody for spinal cord injury. Just thinking about trauma and how we can develop novel therapies for things we don’t really have disease-modifying treatments for was great to hear about, especially how motor and sensory outcomes improved. There are also a lot of new therapies in myasthenia gravis and NMOSD which are spectacular to hear about as well.
One of the topics I also liked but didn’t know much about was noninvasive neurostimulation, for example, using it for stroke recovery. That’s another area where we don’t really have much beyond therapy, nothing really with disease-modifying that’s widely used. So, thinking about whether we can stimulate the brain to get it to work better, how we might do that, was interesting. In epilepsy, we do use neurostimulation, but it’s usually to stop seizures, not to make the brain better. Although there is research looking at how stimulation might improve memory in epilepsy, too.
Something else I thought was good, not so much a scientific breakthrough, but one of the presidential sessions was on patient advocacy. So again, focusing on who we’re serving, what do patients want or need, and how can we make sure we’re not just sweeping in and delivering what we think are advances, but listening to patients and their caregivers and loved ones. So those are some of the highlights. Again, there's so much to learn. But those were a few things I found interesting.
Transcript edited for clarity. Click here to view more NeuroVoices.
