Delighted to have been part of the interdisciplinary team that produced Creativity in Later Life: Beyond Late Style (Routledge, 2019), edited by David Amigoni and Gordon McMullan. My contribution explores Terry Pratchett’s documentary ‘Living with Alzheimer’s’, and resists the idea that dementia patients lose their creativity. Among other things, I see creativity expressed in the ways in which patients negotiate with science and scientific discourse related to dementia.
Category Archives: Neuropharmacology
Changing care
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.
Alzheimer’s disease: have drug developers been on the wrong track for decades?
…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.
Martina Zimmermann 