In 1960, Junarria Narido Burket and her classmates at Leilehua High School, along with more than 400,000 students across the country, were pulled out of class for two days to take a battery of tests.

The research study, dubbed Project Talent, went on to track the students into their 30s, gauging how their aptitudes, expectations and backgrounds altered their life trajectories.

Now, as those teens move through their golden years, the keepers of the data are reaching out to them again. This time, the researchers are focusing on memory and thinking — and what factors might promote or prevent diseases like dementia and Alzheimer’s disease.

“We’re hoping to identify the factors,” said Project Talent director Susan Lapham, and ultimately uncover ways to stem such cognitive decline. “Just like with heart disease in the 1980s that led to all those public service announcements that said to exercise and eat well.”

Burket, a lively 74-year-old grandmother of four, has no trouble remembering the “long, drawn-out test” she took as a sophomore at the Wahiawa high school — as well her teacher’s comment after the results came in.

“She compared me to one of my classmates and told him, you and Junarria should get together because she scored high in mechanicals and you scored very high in homemaking.”

“The class laughed,” Burket added. “But he didn’t.”

In her high school yearbook, Junarria Narido, as she was then known, listed her ambition as “airline stewardess.” But true to her technical talents, she went on to become an electrocardiogram technician — and she also knows how to switch out a faucet and change the oil in her car.

“Instead of trying to scream for help, I’ll do it myself,” she explained in a phone interview from her home in Fresno, Calif.

Project Talent aimed to gather data that would help the country understand and develop the talents of its youth. It was developed by the American Institutes for Research and funded by the U.S. Office of Education. The tests covered aptitude and abilities, personality traits, health, vocational or college interests and family circumstances.

The data yielded a wealth of findings over the decades, including the first study to identify the gender wage gap in the United States as well as the first to identify post-traumatic stress disorder in Vietnam combat veterans, Lapham said.

Altogether, 2,705 students in Hawaii were tested in 1960 at Leilehua, Baldwin and University high schools, Lapham said. Individual scores were sent to guidance counselors so they could help students choose careers that played to their strengths. Participants can still get copies of those original scores if they want to reflect on their lives.

“We are getting into our 70s but we all think we’re still teenagers,” said Jerry Persall, a Leilehua Class of 1962 graduate who now lives in Colorado but gets together regularly with a bunch of his classmates.

Study size, diversity rare

Project Talent is billed as the only large-scale, nationally representative study tracking participants from their teens to retirement age. The study is rare not only for its size and longevity but the diversity of its participants, who came from every walk of life and ethnic group.

With support from the National Institute on Aging, investigators in the Project Talent Aging Study are following up with 22,500 people, a sample of the original participants across the country. In Hawaii, they are taking a deeper dive and hope to survey 1,063 members of the Classes of 1960-63 at Leilehua and Baldwin who were tested in 1960, Lapham said.

“Because our principal investigator is very interested in studying demographics and health of Native Hawaiians, we got additional funding to include the entire sample of these two schools in the study,” she said. “It’s critical for us to get a very high response rate in Hawaii.”

The Project Talent Aging Study is evaluating early life experiences and their association with later cognitive health, including the impact of socioeconomic status, school quality and whether schools were segregated or integrated.

“Segregation in schools has been increasing in recent years, but we know little about the potential long-term impact on health in later life,” Lapham said.

Persall, who arrived at Honolulu Harbor midway through his sophomore year after his family had been posted in Alabama, says living amid the diversity that Hawaii offers had an impact on him.

“It took me out of my comfort zone and challenged me and I learned not only to survive but thrive in a multiracial society,” he said. “I learned to eat strange food. Spam musubi is probably my favorite comfort food.”

He remembers shortly after they came to Wahiawa, the boy next door asked if he wanted to join him spearfishing with his dad, who spoke only Japanese.

“Next thing you know, we were on the North Shore with a flashlight and spear,” Persall recalled. “This Japanese man who is the most wonderful person you’ll ever meet — though we just can’t talk to each other — he is teaching us to reach under the rocks and find cuttlefish.”

Study reactivated

Project Talent researchers decided to reactivate the study in 2009. They sent representatives to 50th anniversary reunions across the continent to connect with former students and they used search tools on the internet to find others. A pilot study indicated that they could locate most people and participants were still willing to take part.

Questionnaires were sent out on Sept. 18 to Hawaii participants for whom the researchers have contact information, and more are on the way. Subjects also may have one-on-one interviews. Lapham urges participants to fill out the surveys, as Burket did promptly after hers arrived.

“They were trying to find out what my health is now, how my memory is, my activities,” Burket said. “I think I did pretty good, because I can still do three things at once, like I did before, when I had a job.”

An analysis of 85,000 Project Talent participants published in the Journal of the American Medical Association on Sept. 7 linked cognitive data from when they were teens with Medicare claims in 2012-13. It found that “lower mechanical reasoning and memory for words in adolescence are associated with greater chances of developing Alzheimer’s.”

Lapham said it’s hard to speculate on what recommendations might come out of the current study until the data is collected. But, she noted, “the brain is malleable, particularly in your youth, and things like spatial ability and abstract reasoning can be taught.”

“Many of the participants we’ve talked to say, even if you don’t solve the problem of dementia for me, I hope you solve this for my kids and grandkids,” Lapham said. “That’s really why we’re doing this study so that future generations have better information on the factors that they can adjust so that they can have healthy brain development.”