A National Institute on Aging-designated Alzheimer's Disease Center
Florence Collins-Hardy (left) with her husband, Robert. Collins-Hardy has been an ABC study participant since 2014. (Linnea Langkammer / Penn Memory Center)
Sandra Shulan is sitting next to her partner, Harry, in the Penn Memory Center (PMC) waiting room at the Perelman Center for Advanced Medicine. She isn’t nervous. In fact, she’s quite looking forward to it.
Her first ABC study visit.
Although our final Memory Café of the year concluded with Curtis Institute of Music last week, our relationship with the the world-class conservatory will continue into the new year.
Since 2015, the PMC has collaborated with the Curtis Institute for various programs including caregiver retreats, the annual Thank You Breakfast and Luncheons, Creative Expression Through Music, and Project HOME.
Our ongoing relationship is detailed in an article published on the PMC website.
Classical music has filled the homes of Penn Memory Center patients since 2016, thanks to a unique partnership with a world-class conservatory.
Violist Rimbo Wong, then a student at the Curtis Institute of Music, worked with PMC to bring free classical performances to West Philadelphia. With her involvement in “Project HOME,” she hoped to shatter the stereotype that classical music is for exclusive audiences.
The Penn Memory Center and the Curtis Institute of Music have collaborated since 2015, sharing successful programs such as Memory Café, caregiver retreats, the annual Thank You Breakfast and Luncheons, Creative Expression Through Music, and Project HOME.
“The partnership between Curtis and the Penn Memory Center is a cherished one and yet another creative means for people to help understand, cope with, and make meaning out of their experiences,” said PMC Executive Director Felicia Greenfield, MSW, LCSW.
Talented, young students from the Curtis Institute of Music joined us on Friday as we wrapped up our final Memory Café of 2018.
The session also marked our three-year anniversary of these special cafés. This week, we’ve been reflecting on how the idea came to life, where it is now, and how we can improve the monthly, 90-minute event.
In an article published on the PMC website, frequent café-goers David and Sue Dyke, and PMC Associate Director of Social Work Alison Lynn, MSW, LCSW, shed insight on what the events offer and how they’ve gotten bigger and better.
“It was very bare bones,” Lynn, who has been leading the sessions since summer 2016, said of the first Memory Café. “It’s evolved now into this thing where we have that time for socialization, then we have a performer. But it was not like that at the beginning.”
David Dyke has a hard time remembering details and dates.
“But he knows when this is,” Sue Dyke says of her husband, a patient at the Penn Memory Center. “It’s written down in his calendar, he knows it’s time to come to the Memory Café.”
Much of Alzheimer’s disease research around the globe involves investigating drugs to figure out if they may help slow the progression of the disease.
And while we too have those trials going on at the PMC (such as the A4 study), it’s not just about drugs here. We’re also investigating a lot of creative ways, many of which focus on cognitive fitness, to tackle Alzheimer’s disease.
Credit: St. Croix Sensory, Inc.
“I’m going to hand you one of these sticks,” Allison Weiss, a research coordinator at the Penn Memory Center (PMC), told a patient. “What does it smell like: lemon, blueberry, mango, or orange*?”
“It’s hard to tell,” the 82-year-old man with mild cognitive impairment replied.
After wafting the stick back and forth under his nose for about 10 seconds, he answered with uncertainty: “smells like a little orange.”
He went on to sniff 15 more sticks, “getting almost none of the smells right,” Weiss said.
To those with an unimpaired sense of smell, distinguishing among the aforementioned artificial odors is likely an easy task. But for individuals with Alzheimer’s and other neurodegenerative diseases, impaired olfactory function is common.
Happy Thanksgiving weekend!
We’re sending this “Sunday” Reads early, because we’ll be out of the office until Monday, November 26. But before we head out, we want to share two newsworthy items.
First, we’d like to highlight PMC Executive Director Felicia Greenfield, MSW, LCSW, who was featured in an Inquirer article which discusses creating holiday celebrations so individuals with dementia and their caregivers can also have a fun time. Greenfield offered a number of tips on how to do so:
Dr. Shana Stites, far right, at the “Stigma in Dementia: It’s Time to Talk About It” Symposium at the national Gerontological Society of America (GSA) meeting last week.
The more people know about how to care for a person with Alzheimer’s disease (AD) dementia, the less likely they are to expect others to react negatively to that person.
That is one finding from the latest study by Penn Memory Center (PMC) Scholar Shana Stites, PsyD, MA, MS, who suggests that teaching caregiving skills could reduce public stigma of AD dementia and help caregivers.
While following the news last week, you may have noticed a number of Alzheimer’s disease-related headlines that seemed too good to be true.
And in fact, they are too good to be true, though they are based on a real study published in mid-October in the journal Frontiers in Neuroscience (the study didn’t gain media attention until a Nov. 5 press release). Before we dive into the study, let’s clear up one thing: drinking coffee is not a proven way to prevent Alzheimer’s disease.