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From time to time, the Penn Memory Center will share selected pieces from Making Sense of Alzheimer’s, a project that explores how people understand and live with Alzheimer’s disease. Through essays, stories, and reflections, this series brings forward voices from patients, caregivers, clinicians, researchers, artists, and writers.

Constance McBride took a long look around the assisted living facility, struck by the gender imbalance among her mother’s peers.

They were predominantly women — wives and mothers, shaped as children by the Great Depression, who had gone on to outlive their spouses. Many of these members of “The Lonely Girls” club were also plagued with memory loss.

Shortly after, the inspired McBride developed The Lonely Girls, a collection of seven sculptures depicting women suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. She is quick to point out that the sculptures are not meant to represent any specific woman, for the most part.

From time to time, the Penn Memory Center will share selected pieces from Making Sense of Alzheimer’s, a project that explores how people understand and live with Alzheimer’s disease. Through essays, stories, and reflections, this series brings forward voices from patients, caregivers, clinicians, researchers, artists, and writers.

Cognitive testing is an important part of aging and dementia research, but many people are unsure what the experience involves.

From time to time, the Penn Memory Center will share selected pieces from Making Sense of Alzheimer’s, a project that explores how people understand and live with Alzheimer’s disease. Through essays, stories, and reflections, this series brings forward voices from patients, caregivers, clinicians, researchers, artists, and writers.

On a rainy Tuesday, Carl Duzen pulls open the garage door to his Havertown home as his wife, Susan Jewett, watches from the dry kitchen.

He goes inside, dives into his toolbox — “he loves his tools,” Susan says — and finds a screwdriver. An old clunker of a television is positioned under the garage’s main light, and Carl starts unscrewing, pulling off the back and exposing the ‘tube.’

The TV, one of those old cathode ray tube sets, was long ago considered obsolete by a neighbor, but Carl sees something valuable, beautiful in the discarded piece of old technology.

A scientist by training, Carl has taken to alchemy in the last two years, turning what others call junk into works of art.

From time to time, the Penn Memory Center will share selected pieces from Making Sense of Alzheimer’s, a project that explores how people understand and live with Alzheimer’s disease. Through essays, stories, and reflections, this series brings forward voices from patients, caregivers, clinicians, researchers, artists, and writers.

Her car parked on the side of a steep Green Lane, Michele Davis looks out over her hometown.

Ahead, there’s the iconic Manayunk Bridge, the face of the neighborhood visible to passers-by on the Schuylkill Expressway. Below, there’s Main Street, where 20-somethings fill the streets on warm summer afternoons and the bars on cold winter nights.

Behind her is the Manayunk she knew as a child: the community center she sneaked into without a membership, the church she attended each weekend, the old neighbors’ homes which have since been sold to strangers.

She takes out the camera, frames the scene before her, presses the shutter, and…

*click*

By Dalia Elsaid

A blood test that costs a fraction of a brain scan could spare patients unnecessary procedures and give doctors more confidence in a diagnosis, according to a recent study.  

Researchers followed 100 memory clinic patients who received a new blood test for Alzheimer’s disease. The test improved diagnostic confidence, reduced unnecessary imaging, and underscored the need for emotional support after results are shared. 

From time to time, the Penn Memory Center will share selected pieces from Making Sense of Alzheimer’s, a project that explores how people understand and live with Alzheimer’s disease. Through essays, stories, and reflections, this series brings forward voices from patients, caregivers, clinicians, researchers, artists, and writers.

Alzheimer’s Disease impacts both its victims and the people who care for them.

Poet Holly Hughes knows this all too well, having cared for her mother as she went through the stages of Alzheimer’s disease.

As a poet, it was only natural for her to find solace in works of poetry. After her mother’s passing in 2001, Hughes decided to preserve her memory in a collection of poems about Alzheimer’s in the hopes that it would help those whose lives had been touched by the disease as well.

“I put out a call for submissions and received over 500 in only a few months time…so clearly there was a lot of beautiful work out there that needed a home.”