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By Meghan McCarthy

When Brianna Morgan, PhD, CRNP, began interviewing persons with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and their care partners, she was met with vulnerability, honesty, and beauty in their reflections.  

At the time, Dr. Morgan was collecting data for her PhD thesis, which explores the experiences of inner strength in persons newly diagnosed with MCI. Inner strength describes an individual’s ability to process and move through challenging circumstances.  

To study this, she conducted interviews with nine pairs of people newly diagnosed with MCI and their care partners both together and individually to better understand their definitions of inner strength and experiences after an MCI diagnosis.  

“I used a realist methodology, which assumes that everybody’s truth is their own. It’s influenced by their own experiences,” said Dr. Morgan. “From the very beginning, I allowed persons to define their own inner strength.”  

While quantitative research methods involve concrete measurements of data collection, Dr. Morgan faced a unique challenge: how to assess these interviews.  

So, she turned their words into poetry.  

Poems of Inner Strength

Spoken by People Living with Mild Cognitive Impairment and their Care Partners

Compiled by Brianna Morgan, MSN, CRNP

By Cait Kearney and Matt Smith

You’ve heard of Alzheimer’s disease, but what about LATE? 

Over 30% of autopsied brains of people older than 80 show the presence of LATE, and 55% of people living with Alzheimer’s disease also have LATE. 

“LATE is a unique and highly prevalent brain disease,” said Michael Tran Duong, PhD, University of Pennsylvania researcher and medical student. 

The Penn Memory Center is offering a variety of free programs for people living with cognitive impairment, caregivers, and their loved ones. Registration for the following programs is open:

Mindfulness and Meditation
Thursdays, 1:00 – 2:00 p.m., starting Jan. 19, virtual

Explore short meditation and mindfulness exercises that help reduce stress and ground you in the present moment.

RSVP for Mindfulness and Meditation

Cognitive Comedy
Tuesdays, 1:30 – 3:00 p.m., starting Jan. 24, virtual 
Cognitive Comedy is an improv comedy workshop for people with cognitive impairment and their loved ones.

RSVP for Cognitive Comedy

By Meghan McCarthy 

A team of University of Pennsylvania researchers found that Black Americans are aging faster than white Americans, and inequities in socioeconomic resources is the main cause. 

Scientists measure age with more data than just a birthdate. Biological age accounts for the various experiences in life that may slow or quicken the way your body ages. 

“There are some people who are 80, super healthy, and live for many years. Then, there are 65-year-olds that already have many health problems,” said Isabel Yannatos, PhD candidate. “Biological age reflects the differences in how people develop health problems as they age.” 

On January 6, the Food and Drug Adminstration (FDA) approved the Alzheimer’s drug lecanemab via its Accelerated Approval pathway.

The Accelerated Approval pathway allows for faster approval of drugs that are used to treat serious conditions and diseases while maintaining safety standards. Lecanemab, branded as “Leqembi,” was found to slow cognitive decline in people living with early-stage Alzheimer’s disease.

By Meghan McCarthy 

Smartwatches can quickly tell users how many steps they’ve taken, what’s next on their calendar, or even how well they’re sleeping. But could they be used to measure empathy? 

If so, the data could be an innovative tool in the understudied form of dementia called bv FTD, or behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia, said Penn Memory Center Clark Scholar Emma Rhodes, PhD.   

Persons living with bv FTD often lose compassion for the people to whom they are closest, such as their spouses or children. Many struggle to notice social cues and as a result tend to respond inappropriately or not at all to emotional situations.  

“Empathy requires being able to notice when someone is upset and identify when it’s appropriate to show compassion,” said Dr. Rhodes. “Because this requires many brain regions, it’s hard to scientifically pin down the mechanisms behind this.”  

By Marilyn Perkins

Emily Largent, Photo credit: UPenn Communications and Eric Sucar

When Emily Largent worked as an ICU nurse at UCLA, she didn’t shy away from the difficult cases. It wasn’t necessarily the medical procedures themselves that were challenging; caring for patients after organ transplants or managing a patient on life support were part of the job description. What really drew Largent to a case was the tough decisions that were involved. Should this patient really be a candidate for an organ transplant? What do we do when a patient’s family disagrees about ending life support?

As Largent worked on these cases, she saw the same questions come up again and again—and she had to solve them, again and again. “And it struck me,” she says, “that these might be instances where we need a systemic change, so that we weren’t repeatedly needing to come up with one-off solutions.”

That realization drove Largent to enter a bioethics fellowship at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) with Ezekiel Emmanuel, now a Penn Integrates Knowledge University Professor and the vice provost for global initiatives. She went on to obtain her J.D. and Ph.D. in health policy and is now an assistant professor of medical ethics and health policy at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine. While she no longer works in the ICU, she’s built a career dissecting the ethical issues around one of the leading causes of death in the United States: Alzheimer’s disease.

Alzheimer’s is “a huge public health problem,” says Largent. About 1 in 9 people older than 65 have Alzheimer’s dementia, and new diagnoses of the neurodegenerative disease are projected to double by 2050. The growing threat of Alzheimer’s has stoked the search for a cure or disease-modifying treatment.