Giving a paper at the workshop Working Together: Collaboration beyond the Academy in Research in Dementia and Culture, London, November 23, 2018.
Sharing Tony Britton’s (Pam Britton Trust for Dementia) and my work towards changing dementia care – on how a neuropharmacologist-cum-health-humanist and a caregiver-turned-activist work together to achieve improved caregiver and patient support.
Giving a presentation on the trajectory from dementia as narrative experiment to the patient as plot device at the ‘Dementia, Violence, and the Politics of Memory in Contemporary Literature, Film, and Comics’ workshop at Freie Universität Berlin, Germany, September 13-15, 2018.
I have reviewed Janette Davies’s Living before Dying, a book amongst others about the relationship between the patient’s and caregiver’s quality of life in professional care settings, in this week’s Times Higher Education: https://www.timeshighereducation.com/books/review-living-before-dying-janette-davies-berghahn.
How do people with Alzheimer’s disease articulate their illness experience? Read more in my post to the King’s College London English Department blog about my new book, The Poetics and Politics of Alzheimer’s Disease Life-Writing, at https://blogs.kcl.ac.uk/english/2017/10/04/the-poetics-and-politics-of-alzheimers-disease-life-writing/#more-1132.
I was very interested to read of this Italian initiative of listening to the patient, which took place earlier this month, as featured in the Corriere della Sera.
My book on The Poetics and Politics of Alzheimer’s Disease Life-Writing has been released. Thanks to Wellcome Trust funding the book is open access and you can download it free from the publisher’s website (click here).
…it is becoming increasingly obvious that there is unlikely to be a silver bullet solution to such a complex disease [like Alzheimer’s …]. What is needed is a much more holistic approach to the whole disease, rather than trying to compartmentalise it neatly within an ‘amyloid hypothesis’, a ‘Tau hypothesis’ or anything else.
Criticism related to the continued large-scale investment in drug development that builds on one specific disease hypothesis. The full article containing the above quote can be found in Chemistry World.
For a recent scientific review that ‘explores the proposition that we are over-reliant on amyloid to define and diagnose AD and that the time has come to face our fears and reject the amyloid cascade hypothesis’, see for example Karl Herrup’s Perspective article in Nature Neuroscience.
