On 15 October, an international team of researchers from the European Prevention of Alzheimer's Dementia (EPAD) project published an article in the journal Research Involvement and Engagement entitled “Involving research participants in a pan-European research initiative: the EPAD participant panel experience”. One of the founding goals of the EPAD programme was to involve participants as research partners. EPAD set up a series of ‘participant panels’ in England, France, Scotland, Spain and The Netherlands. These panels were formed from groups of participants in the study who met at least twice a year with researchers.
This paper reports on the set up, running and experiences of the EPAD participant panel and describes how participants were invited to join. Panels successfully contributed to study documents, study videos and presenting at national and international meetings. The authors of this paper include Director for Projects Dianne Gove. Congratulations to all, on this publication! The EPAD project has received support from the Innovative Medicines Initiative Joint Undertaking under grant agreement n° 115736, resources of which are composed of financial contribution from the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) and EFPIA companies’ in kind contribution.