Transcript My Journey It seems only yesterday that the Bob’s Last Marathon podcast made its debut, with the generous and compassionate support of people around me. We tackled the basics—the essentials that the person with dementia needs to live as normally as possible, and tips on survival for family and friends. We addressed specific areas…
Transcript Life After Caregiving Katie Brandt: Hi, I’m Katie Brandt, Director of Caregiver Support Services and Public Relations for the Frontotemporal Disorders Unit at Massachusetts General Hospital. I am here today with Judith Johanson, a member of the Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center at Massachusetts General Hospital, to share a conversation about life after caregiving for…
Transcript Blood-Based Biomarkers Almost a year ago, on Bob’s Last Marathon, I did a podcast on biomarkers and talked about how they have transformed the way we both diagnose and understand Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias. We have learned so much from MRI scans, PET scans, and lab tests of spinal fluid samples about whether…
Transcript The Promise of Anti-Amyloid Therapies: Roundtable Excerpt 2 Dr. David A. Wolk: This is really a major shift in how all of us practice neurology or dementia care for patients with Alzheimer’s disease or suspected Alzheimer’s disease. It’s really complicated administering these drugs; they involve infusions every two weeks for lecanemab. They involve monitoring…
Transcript Progress on Anti-Amyloid Therapies: Roundtable Excerpt 1 Dr. Steven E. Arnold: We are really excited to be in a new era of medical care for people with Alzheimer’s disease. And before Dr. Wolk introduces us to the new anti-amyloid therapies for Alzheimer’s disease and tells us how the studies went that led to the…
Transcript Caregiving and Mental Health In my role as a therapist and coach to families caring for a loved one with dementia, I have counseled hundreds of caregivers over the years. I have learned that caring for someone with dementia is a journey that demands resilience, compassion, and understanding. Caregivers devote so much of themselves…
Transcript Communication—Meeting the Challenges Dementia can pose challenges by changing the way a person communicates. Repetition, confusion, and inappropriate language are just a few examples of what caregivers may face. Today, we would like to share some curated content from past episodes that our audience has found to be the most useful—in developing techniques, and…
Transcript Planning Events Over the years I have seen that one of the biggest challenges in caregiving is that many family members and friends do not fully understand that their loved one is changing. They will not or cannot accept that modifications need to be made to help their loved one remain comfortable and engaged….
Transcript Holidays Holidays are meant to be a time of joy, celebration, and tradition, but they can also be stressful and hectic. Caring for a person living with dementia can bring additional holiday stress to a caregiver. How your loved one participates in your holiday rituals will need to be adjusted. I’d like to share…
Transcript Getting Started: Tips for the Newly Diagnosed Hearing news about a diagnosis, for ourselves or our loved ones, can be a devastating, confusing, and difficult experience. To help our listeners find the way to some helpful information, and look for guidance on getting started, we’ve curated content from past episodes that our audience has…
Transcript GUIDE: A Comprehensive Dementia Care Model On July 31, 2023, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) announced a new voluntary nationwide model—the Guiding an Improved Dementia Experience (or GUIDE) model—a pilot that aims to support people living with dementia and their unpaid caregivers. In today’s podcast, I will share a bit about…
Transcript Reflections: AAIC 2023 The Alzheimer’s Association International Conference, or AAIC, is the world’s largest dementia research conference. This past July, AAIC was live in Amsterdam and also offered virtually. AAIC supports the community’s efforts to advance research and care that are so important to so many people, and this year there were nearly 9,500…
Transcript The Promise of Biomarkers More and more, the term “biomarkers” is being used in the context of diagnosing and monitoring Alzheimer’s disease and related disorders. But what does the term “biomarker” mean? In essence this is a biological feature of a disease that we can measure either through imaging, laboratory tests, or other kinds…
Transcript Now What? A dropped word here, a missed appointment there. A fender bender, forgetting the name of a neighbor. Are these warning signs of cognitive decline? Not necessarily, but sometimes they are. It’s not uncommon for families to brush off some of these signs and to minimize or ignore them, even when the signs…
Transcript The Road to Diagnosis When friends struggle to encourage their family members to get tested for cognitive impairment, they sometimes ask how long it took me and Bob to talk to his doctor and start the process. It surprises my friends when I tell them that my best estimate is six years—six years after…
Transcript A Person-Centered Approach to Caregiving I’d like to begin by acknowledging that outpatient clinical practices that treat people with Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias are limited by what they can do, by what they can do by way of care. As you just heard from Dr. Arnold, by and large, at this point in…
Transcript Update on Diagnosis and Treatment of Alzheimer’s Disease We’ve made tremendous strides in our ability to diagnose Alzheimer’s disease and other causes of cognitive decline, of dementia in older people. And in terms of treatment, we’ve had a major scientific advance this past year, with the news that amyloid-lowering immunotherapies can slow down the…
Transcript Public Policies to Help Us Live Well with Dementia My colleague, Steven Arnold, talked about how we’ve made and we will continue to make some path-breaking and even spectacular advances in developing better diagnostics and, especially, better therapeutics. Particularly the therapeutics that target the mechanisms of the diseases. And I can identify the patients…
Transcript The Male Caregiver One day, while working as a clinical psychologist in a primary care practice, I was asked by the family doctor meeting that morning with a 72-year-old woman with moderate dementia to see her 75-year-old husband for counseling for possible depression. Within the hour, I watched the couple arrive at our front…
Transcript Lifestyle and Diet in Alzheimer’s Disease Prevention When we talk about memory and thinking as we get older, many people comment on “senior moments” or trouble juggling two things at once. What may surprise some people is that in fact most, but not all, of our cognitive abilities peak around age 20. A number…
Transcript Making Time Together Finding ways to stay socially connected can be challenging at any age—but it may be especially difficult for people living with dementia. The person’s cognitive impairment might make them feel uneasy in social situations. And negative stereotypes about people with dementia may cause friends to feel fearful or uncomfortable, and fade…
Transcript Genetics and Alzheimer’s Disease A lot of us are concerned about our risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease, particularly if we’ve watched parents or siblings die of the disease. If we’ve lost partners to Alzheimer’s disease, we may wonder whether our children are destined for the same course. Researchers have found that we’re more likely…
Transcript Young Caregiver Mike and I were both 29 when we sat in an exam room at Boston’s Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. Dr. Galaburda, Chief of Cognitive Neurology at the time, listened patiently to my list of concerns and reviewed all of Mike’s medical records from the year before. He asked Mike to list…
Transcript Lewy Body Dementias The Lewy body dementias are the second most common neurodegenerative dementia after Alzheimer’s, affecting some 1.4 million Americans, yet few of us have heard of them. Two clinically distinct but related diseases comprise the Lewy body dementias: dementia with Lewy bodies, also known as DLB, and Parkinson’s dementia. The hallmark neuropathology…
Transcript Reflections: AAIC 2022 AAIC 2022, the Alzheimer’s Association International Conference, drew more than 9,000 scientists and featured more than 4,000 presentations in person in San Diego, CA, and online around the world. As Director of Caregiver Support Services for the Massachusetts General Hospital Frontotemporal Disorders Unit, I was attending as a professional in the…
Transcript The Final Loss Sometimes Alzheimer’s is referred to as the long goodbye. Once diagnosed, a person can live with dementia for ten or more years, experiencing a steady stream of cognitive and functional losses along the way. Yet, families still experience the final loss as a surprise. Stanley and Eve had been married for…
Transcript Love, Living, and Alzheimer’s Amy Bloom’s much publicized book, In Love, and her story about her and her husband’s decision to end his life following the diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease shocked, saddened, bewildered, and disturbed me. Images from the years following my own husband Bob’s diagnosis, the long, unpredictable journey—punctuated by anguish and despair…
Transcript Challenging Behaviors: Tools and Techniques Stefanie Bonigut: Jodi had come to a support group to get suggestions on how to address a behavioral symptom her mom with Alzheimer’s was experiencing. Her mom had what Jodi called fantasies and she often wanted to act or did act on them. One example Jodi gave was her mom…