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By Michele W. Berger, Penn Today

Mid-morning on a Wednesday in early May, Jean Haskell tries to quiet a dozen chatty adults on a Zoom call. “Alright, everybody, we’re going to start. We’re going to do a lot today. We’ll be getting ready for a performance next week, and we’ll be telling some jokes.”

She asks participants to say their name along with an adjective and gesture for everyone else to copy.

“My name is Charles. An adjective? Crude,” says one person, before holding up his thumb in hitchhiker fashion. There’s a collective chuckle.

Hellacious Helen makes horns on her head with two fingers and Suspicious Susan pretends to hold a telescope up to her eyes. After each one, the participants mimic the speaker, laughing at the silliness of it all. But as Haskell—who introduces herself as Jazzy Jean, replete with jazz hands—hoped it would, the exercise breaks the ice perfectly.

By Sharnita Midgett

The impact that blood pressure has on dementia risk has often been studied, and new research continues to study this relation. This year, researchers found that an average higher blood pressure in black individuals may contribute to racial differences in dementia risk. 

In an article titled, “Association Between Blood Pressure and Later-Life Cognition Among Black and White Individuals,” researchers analyzed data from five other studies related to heart health and stroke. These studies provided demographic data — information on race and sex — as well as data on brain health. Black Americans had a significantly faster decline in brain health and had a higher cumulative blood pressure than white Americans, according to the data in this study.

One of the researchers, Deborah Levine, MD, MPH, is an associate professor at the University of Michigan who has studied disparities in cardiovascular and brain health. She was motivated by her clinical experience seeing disparities across racial, ethnic, sociodemographic, and geographic backgrounds and was also “motivated by a sense of justice that disparities should be reduced if not eliminated.”  

By Kamila Ahmad 

Deterioration of a part of the brain known as the medial temporal lobe can cause an older adult to make more impulsive decisions. 

One decision-making process — temporal discounting — places a greater value on a smaller and immediate outcome while dismissing a better but delayed outcome: instant gratification, in other words.

Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center explored this cognition and found that individual differences in temporal discounting are driven by episodic memory function and that a deteriorating medial temporal lobe may impact the ability to delay gratification.  

This finding was reported in the September 2020 edition of the journal Neuropsychologia by Penn Memory Center Clark Scholar Karolina Lempert, PhD.

By Sharnita Midgett

Last month, the Aging Brain Cohort (ABC) study resumed in-person testing after a four-month hiatus. Jay Austin, 64, was the first study participant back in the MRI scanner.

Originally from New Jersey, Austin has worked as a senior-level administrator in many of the nation’s top law schools, including several in California. During his career, he spent two years working and living in Azerbaijan to assist in the establishment of a new university. When he is not traveling with his wife of 21 years, Tamara, reading historical non-fiction or visiting US presidential libraries, he is preparing for his next research visit at the Penn Memory Center.

Austin, who was previously enrolled in the ADNI 3 study, joined the ABC study in 2019. He spoke with Research Coordinator Sharnita Midgett about returning to the study in 2020:

Penn Memory Center Neurologist Roy Hamilton, MD, MS

By Melissa Moody, Penn Medicine

Close your eyes and imagine a person with Alzheimer’s disease. Now open them. Is the person you imagined Black?

If not, maybe they should be, according to Penn Memory Center Neurologist Roy Hamilton, MD, MS, an associate professor of Neurology and Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation at the Perelman School of Medicine. “Looking at the relative prevalence of the disease in different populations, the prototypical person you imagine when you close your eyes ought to be Black or Latinx, because the risk of Alzheimer’s disease and related neurodegenerative conditions is so much higher in communities of color.”

By Danny Yarnall

Researchers from the Penn Memory Center and around the world convened July 27-31 at the Alzheimer’s Association International Conference (AAIC). Instead of meeting in a major metro, like previous host cities Chicago or Los Angeles, AAIC was held in a virtual, free, and public format.

All who registered have for the remainder of the month access to an on-demand library of presentations on topics ranging from dementia care biomarkers and machine learning. 

PMC was well-represented at the conference with 13 researchers presenting more than 30 abstracts, while also highlighting PMC research through lectures, posters, and discussion sessions.

Dementia care can be a struggle for both the care recipient and caregiver. Caregivers could feel overwhelmed and recipients feel cornered now more than ever with public health restrictions limiting access to activities, groups, help outside the home.

Arden Courts Memory Care Community and care expert Teepa Snow, MS, ORT/L, FAOTA will host a webinar at 3:00 p.m. EDT Wednesday, August 18, 2020, for caregivers who want new strategies managing their loved ones’ daily care.

Teepa Snow is an occupational therapist with four decades of experience and the founder of Positive Approach® to Care (PAC), a company that provides dementia training and care services to clients worldwide. Teepa will host a seminar on how to respond to the most common symptoms and behaviors of people living with dementia and how to accept the changes that come with dementia care without losing control or feeling overwhelmed.

You can register for the webinar here.

By Danny Yarnall

Shana Stites, PsyD, MA, MS, recently was a part of the 2020 Butler Williams Scholar’s Conference gathering of rising aging and dementia scholars in early July. 

Dr. Shana Sites is a PMC Clark Scholar, a clinical psychologist, and a researcher with the Penn Program on Precision Medicine for the Brain (P3MB). Applications for the program opened in October 2019 and closed in February 2020. The pool of potential attending scholars had to hold a doctorate and either engage in aging research or actively consider working the field. The NIA announced the accepted scholars in April of this year.

By Kamila Ahmad

Penn Memory Center neurologist Sanjeev Vaishnavi, MD, PhD, was recently named a member of the Alzheimer’s Clinical Trials Consortium (ACTC) Early Career Project Evaluation Committee (PEC). 

ACTC is a clinical trials infrastructure launched in December 2017 and designed to accelerate and expand studies for therapies in Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias. Through the PEC, ACTC will improve diversity amongst early-career investigators and professionals while providing mentorship for research fellows. 

At PMC, Dr. Vaishnavi conducts clinical research to discover better ways to diagnose and treat neurodegenerative diseases, with an emphasis on early diagnosis and prevention. He specializes in the diagnosis and treatment of older adults with cognitive impairment and dementia, including Alzheimer’s and other neurodegenerative conditions, and training medical students, neurology residents, and fellows to be the next generation of leaders. 

By Kamila Ahmad

Historically, a patient would not be diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease until after the onset of cognitive decline. Biomarkers such as amyloid and neurodegeneration are changing that. 

Researchers are able to use these and other biomarkers to identify individuals with “preclinical” Alzheimer’s disease, even if the individual does not yet report symptoms like memory loss. This can help develop clinical trials that hope to intervene early and potentially prevent dementia, but it also requires additional ethical considerations, Clark Scholar Emily Largent, PhD, JD, RN said on a recent episode of the Finding Genius Podcast.