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Joe Freshman is 14 years old and has never known a new Alzheimer’s disease (AD) treatment approved by the Food and Drug Administration. Study leaders hope that he’ll see one before returning from winter break, but one Penn Memory Center researcher cautions that a new FDA-approved drug alone isn’t necessarily “the answer to our prayers.”

Pharmaceutical company Lilly is testing the drug Solanezumab, designed to target amyloid, which physicians and researchers think is at least partially responsible for AD. Results of this study will be released by the end of 2016, and if the results indicate that this drug helps patients, “Alzheimer’s doctors will have a new drug to prescribe and also a new way to talk about the disease,” PMC Co-Director Dr. Jason Karlawish wrote in his latest Forbes column.

Penn Medicine, while acting upon its mission to work with the Philadelphia community, provides annual grants to staff, physicians, and medical students to support their community service programs. Past programs have helped students purchase textbooks, receive SAT and college readiness tutoring, and provide outpatient care those people who would not have seen a clinician without the efforts of the Penn Medicine CAREs grant.

Last year, a CAREs grant was awarded to Tigist Hailu’s Typical Day project. Hailu, the Penn Memory Center coordinator for diversity in research and education, used the photo-elicitation project to better understand the daily lives of people with mild cognitive impairment.

Hailu gave 12 participants a point-and-shoot camera and instructed them “to capture their everyday life, things that either frustrated or challenged their memory,” she said. Hailu partnered with photographer Damari McBride, who photographed portraits of the participants to accompany the images taken by the participants themselves.

“The goal,” Hailu said, “is really to use the participant-generated images along with the quotes from interviews, and also the portraits taken by the photographer, to raise awareness about cognitive impairment in our community.”

Through Typical Day, Hailu shared a vivid and important window into the lives of friends, family, and neighbors living with mild cognitive impairment.

A public gallery of Typical Day portraits and stories opened in late September at the Perelman Center for Advanced Medicine and will be exhibited throughout Philadelphia once it moves beyond Penn’s campus. A more complete and permanent exhibit (with more information) is found online at www.mytypicalday.org.

— By David Ney

Voting is a an essential right that challenges millions of Americans who have dementia and Alzheimer’s disease.

For adults living with Alzheimer’s disease, voting is not a legal issue, since states allow helpers into the voting booth. There is an ethical dilemma at play, however: Can this population of voters understand the decisions they are making? There is also a debate among experts as to whether people with dementia can make the deeply personal decision on their own.

“The civil rights of people with dementia are very much in the hands of other people” — namely their nursing staff or family members who may not have the proper training to help ensure that the person voting is exercising their own opinion, Dr. Jason Karlawish, co-director of the Penn Memory Center and thought leader on ethical issues in Alzheimer’s disease, told www.statnews.com.

Click here to read more about the story of one committed voter and his fight against dementia.

— By David Ney

As more Alzheimer’s disease (AD) prevention trials require participants to undergo genetic or biomarker testing in order to enroll, researchers must address how to disclose the results of tests that foreshadow whether a healthy person may develop AD dementia.

At the Alzheimer’s Association International Conference (AAIC) held July 22-28 in Toronto, researchers and clinicians discussed how to approach these difficult conversations.

“Understanding how people react to these test results is as important as understanding their response to a drug,” Dr. Jason Karlawish, co-director of the Penn Memory Center, told Alzforum. “The future practice will be ‘get a test, get a drug,’ and we need to understand the combined impact of both of those interventions.”

When Dr. Jason Karlawish turned 50 last month, he celebrated with some of his staff over a vanilla cake and a custom birthday card at what was scheduled on his calendar as a lab meeting.

“Age is just a number,” one staff member offered between bites.

On the contrary, said Karlawish, without a hint of pessimism. An adult’s brain has reached “maximum cognitive abilities” at age 50, and he needed to plan for his future.

That developing plan was the topic of his latest Forbes column, published this week.