By Meghan McCarthy
Ed and Marcia Kung first discovered the Penn Memory Center (PMC) in 2008 when a neighbor asked for a ride to an appointment with his Alzheimer’s doctor.
For the 15 years since, they have been dedicated participants in the center’s Aging Brain Cohort (ABC) study, even planning to donate their brains for scientific advancement after death.
Though without cognitive complaints, their decade-plus commitment to research has trickled into their end-of-life plans. It sounds paradoxical, but the Kungs say the decision to donate their brains was relatively simple: they understood the importance of brain donation, specifically from healthy individuals, in the field of Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias (ADRDs).