Prime Minister announces funding for UK’s first National Dementia Research Institute – UK’s first Dementia Research Institute receive up to £150m of investment.
in 2006, it was announced that Dementia will be the next epidemic sweeping through Asia. Almost a decade on and numerous publications by academics and global organisations such as the World Health organisation and Alzheimer’s Disease International, little has been done in the areas of preventative measures of the condition. The condition now costing Asia billions of dollars and much suffering among caregivers is still seen to be a distant cousin of health issues such as diabetes, cancer and heart disease. Healthcare publications in Asia can still be seen making claims that dementia is reversible, and numerous clinicians are unaware that dementia is a terminal condition. Resulting in a large focus in the quantitative aspects, such as rehabilitation, life-prolonging procedures instead of focusing on qualitative; such as the maintenance of a person’s independence, dignity and overall quality of life.
More research is required in Asia to help find the balance between challenging cultural issues especially in the areas of prolonging life in dementia and maintaining a person’s quality of life. Perhaps in this technological age, Asia should come together to look into setting up collaborative research centres to work cohesively to find answers to culturally difficult care components for people with dementia and eventually find us a cure.
In Asia, it is not uncommon for us to be living in tiny living space. From Tokyo, Singapore, China and even Thailand, we’ve all heard, know or even are living in very tiny homes in a very overcrowded city. Cost of living is high, we pay a mint for our homes and we end up living in little shoeboxes in the sky. In a recent article by the Atlantic. The issues of micro apartments were discussed and the question is “how small can our living spaces get before it starts to impact on our physical and psychological health?”
The article talks about how these apartments serve their purpose for young, childless couples who had just started out in the world and wish to live close to the city or work or play. However, for people with children or living in a multigenerational family unit, how do people cope?
Looking back in Asia, for many in the sandwich generation, working long 10 to 14-hour shifts, caring for children and our parents. The home is suppose to be a safe haven, but when overcrowding occurs some people may feel a sense of dread befalling on them when it is time to go home. Trapped between the tortures of work and the stress of claustrophobic home.
The article talks about how living in small apartments can affect the concentration of children and in turn, impact on their studies. The article also talks about the lack of privacy and how it may cause children to become withdrawn. If these housing conditions can have such fundamental impacts on children the implications for older adults living in such apartments with cognitive impairment and dementia must be very challenging.
However, in Japan, despite the overcrowding and challenging living conditions, strong community initiatives have risen to help support the physical and mental well-being of older adults living in these housing conditions. The Dementia Support Caravan (DSC), founded a decade ago help apartment managers to work with older tenants who may be living with dementia and require support from the community. As the number of people with dementia
The Dementia Support Caravan (DSC), founded a decade ago help apartment managers to work with older tenants who may be living with dementia and require support from the community. As the number of people with dementia continue to grow in Asia and housing conditions continue to remain unchanged; initiatives such as the DSC can help older adults with dementia age in place in their units within the community. It is in hope that more urban regions in Asia may develop similar programmes to support the people with dementia and their family living in the high-rise communities.
The Cell Press journal reported that a small study from the University of Pisa and the Neuroscience Institute, National Research Council (CNR) have found that exercise may improve the plasticity of the adult brain, which was thought to decline with age.
Physical activity may leave the brain more open to change | EurekAlert! Science News
Learning, memory, and brain repair depend on the ability of our neurons to change with experience. Now, researchers reporting in the Cell Press journal Current Biology on December 7 have evidence from a small study in people that exercise may enhance this essential plasticity of the adult brain.The findings focused on the visual cortex come as hopeful news for people with conditions including amblyopia (sometimes called lazy eye), traumatic brain injury, and more, the researchers say.”We provide the first demonstration that moderate levels of physical activity enhance neuroplasticity in the visual cortex of adult humans,” says Claudia Lunghi of the University of Pisa in Italy.”By showing that moderate levels of physical activity can boost the plastic potential of the adult visual cortex, our results pave the way to the development of non-invasive therapeutic strategies exploiting the intrinsic brain plasticity in adult subjects,” she adds.The plastic potential of the cerebral cortex is greatest early in life, when the developing brain is molded by experience. …
###This research has received funding from the European Research Council.Current Biology, Lunghi and Sale: “A cycling lane for brain rewiring” http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2015.10.026Current Biology (@CurrentBiology), published by Cell Press, is a bimonthly journal that features papers across all areas of biology. Current Biology strives to foster communication across fields of biology, both by publishing important findings of general interest and through highly accessible front matter for non-specialists. For more information please visit http://www.cell.com/current-biology. To receive media alerts for Cell Press journals, contact press@cell.com.
Summary: A new study that emerged from Yale school of public health has indicated that stress from negative beliefs about aging is associated with Alzheimers disease.
From source: Alzheimer’s Disease Photo credit: Dreamstime
Negative Beliefs About Aging Predict Alzheimer’s Disease in Yale-led Study | Yale School of Public Health
Saw this article below this morning and I thought it’s a very important article to highlight the dangers of over-prescribing psychotropic medication for people with dementia. Some of the risk factors include:
falls
bone fractures
suffer impaired consciousness
It was recommended in the article that non-pharmaceutical options should be the first intervention before the introduction of drugs. It was also recommended that the low doses of the drugs should be prescribed in the initial stages of treatment for BPSD.
As a massive wave of Japanese enter their twilight years, an expert is calling for prudent use of psychotropic drugs to treat dementia patients, some of whom have suffered ill health due to over-prescription.
The Health, Labor and Welfare Ministry released guidelines on how to prescribe such drugs for dementia patients in 2013 to avoid casual prescription by doctors. The Japanese Society of Psychiatry and Neurology is also training doctors on the appropriate application of the drugs…
My husband and I have been talking about kids for a long time now, and I’m certainly not getting any younger. As the days tick by and my facebook is filled with walls of baby photos in my activity feed, I wonder about having my own. On top of that I wonder what the future will hold for my children? I am Singaporean, my husband is Australian, our racial and cultural differences are vast. We look like chalk and cheese and our cultures are chalk and cheese. I am born and raised in Singapore and proud of it.
Looking back at my youth when I was growing up, the house was filled with an orchestra of languages. Instead of the wind, brass, drums and percussions, we had English songs from Abba, Michael Jackson, Kenny Rogers, playing on the radio. I remembered my mum even attended a Debbie Gibson concert. That was really cool! I remembered the souvenir she brought back, it was a fan in the shape of a blue hand, sounds odd now but when I was a kid, that was possibly super cool.
There would be English in the background, my great grandmother speaking in the Teochew dialect, my mum in Mandarin and my dad would speak in either English or Teochew. Sometimes I hear him speaking Malay to the man who comes to collect the payments for our daily newspaper. Singapore was an amazing melting pot of cultures and languages, and I embraced every crumb of the colourful heritage that I can call my own. There was never a dull moment growing up in Singapore, my childhood was certainly a happy one.
Image from abusymom.wordpress.com
My child will have an Asian migrant parent depending on where we will reside when we retire, and I often wonder what will happen to my children when I have dementia. Will they be able to speak my language if I regress to Mandarin or Teochew? Will I lose the ability to communicate because there will be no one who can understand me? I remember caring for a lady who spoke Russian and I would carry a notebook with me with some basic words like “dobroye utro” or good morning, “Da” for yes and “Net” for no, and about 20 other phrases for different times of the day and meals. I wondered if her children could speak the language?
Sometimes I watch the western videos on nursing homes or visit residential aged care homes and I think, I’m never going to be comfortable in a place like this. It’s beautiful, no doubt about it, but there’s nothing familiar in the four walls. Even the people look foreign, no one speaks my language, the food is all wrong and if I were to live in a residential aged care facility, it would be like living in a foreign television show. I would think I was on the Truman show or something. I have only seen one Asian nursing home in Australia, the home is lovely, with Asian staff and sumptuous simple Chinese meals, with menus beautifully printed in Mandarin, but the environment itself looks like community hospital on the inside with nursing reception counters and a very modern western feel.
There are 10.6 million Asian immigrants in the United States of America in 2009, in the United Kingdom almost 10% of immigrants are from South Asia and in Australia a million immigrants were from Asia according to the statistics in 2011.
I wonder if I am the only person with these worries and thoughts? I wonder what happens to Asian immigrants who work long and hard to bring their children to the west, only to live out the end of their lives in confusing and disorientating environments? What can we do for them, and how can we make their lives better? Will there be more places that can cater for Asian migrants? Where can we go to feel at home when we have dementia?
I have no answers and only questions, hopefully, time will tell.
References:
Australian Bureau of Statistics 2004, ‘Where do the Overseas-born population live?’ in Australian Social Trends, cat. no. 4102.0, viewed: 18 May 2012, <http://www.abs.gov.au/AUSSTATS/abs@.nsf/mf/4102.0>.
Salt, J. “International Migration and the United Kingdom, 2010.” Report of the United Kingdom SOPEMI correspondent to the OECD, Migration Research Unit, University College London, 2011.
U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Office of Immigration Statistics. 2010 Yearbook of Immigration Statistics.
I’ve attached a video that I found very moving about the trials and tribulations experienced by migrant parents to help people understand the difficulties of resettling and raising children in a foreign land. I also found a funny video about the same group of kids and parents imitating each other and that’s actually really funny.
Designing for Aged Care 