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Stephen Hume pictured his life as a room full of open windows and doors. Outside, the sun was shining, illuminating the path his life could take as he stepped through one of the countless thresholds.

But when his doctor diagnosed him with Alzheimer’s disease, “all those doors and windows shut, and I was in the dark.”

The House of Alzheimer’s Disease, where Hume found himself after that moment, has but one entrance through a door called dementia, Penn Memory Center Co-Director Dr. Jason Karlawish said.

Speaking at “The Changing Face of Alzheimer’s, Revisited,” a February symposium hosted by Drexel University, Karlawish explained that what he calls the House of Alzheimer’s Disease is slated for substantial reconstruction.

“To enter the House of Alzheimer’s Disease, an Alzheimer’s doctor like myself has to diagnose and label you with dementia. Until now,” he said.

Bankers and financial analysts are the “front lines” of screening and detection of cognitive impairment, and their industries need to catch up before a growing problem becomes uncontrollable.

“The banking and financial services industry of today that fails to address this problem will not be around tomorrow,” Penn Memory Center Co-Director Dr. Jason Karlawish said Monday at the 2016 Securities Industry Institute at The Wharton School. “It’s time to rethink your business model.”

Former First Lady Nancy Reagan, caregiver to President Ronald Reagan after he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, died Sunday morning.

In 1994, Ronald Reagan announced in a letter: “I have recently been told that I am one of the millions of Americans who will be afflicted with Alzheimer’s disease.”

From that moment forward, he and Nancy Reagan held a public dialogue of his diagnosis and the disease, Penn Memory Center Co-Director Dr. Jason Karlawish told The Philadelphia Inquirer.

It was “tremendously courageous of them to issue that letter to the nation because it directly challenged the stigma that was attached to the diagnostic label,” Karlawish said.

Read the complete obituary at www.philly.com.

Dr. William Jagust explains how tau and beta amyloid, two proteins associated with Alzheimer’s disease, develop in the aging brain. (Photo by Stephen McNally, UC Berkeley)

New research led by scientists at UC Berkeley shows for the first time that PET scans can track the progressive stages of Alzheimer’s disease in cognitively normal adults, a key advance in the early diagnosis and staging of the neurodegenerative disorder.

In the process, the scientists also obtained important clues about two Alzheimer’s-linked proteins – tau and beta-amyloid – and how they relate to each other.

The findings, published March 2 in the journal Neuron, come from positron emission tomography (PET) of 53 adults. Five were young adults aged 20-26, 33 were cognitively healthy adults aged 64-90 and 15 were patients aged 53-77 who had been diagnosed with probable Alzheimer’s dementia.

A little more than a year after the White House announced the Precision Medicine Initiative, researchers at Penn and across the nation are optimistic about the future of clinical treatment for Alzheimer’s disease.

The “all-in approach” taken by federal agencies “could not be happening at a more opportune time,” said Cynthia Bens, executive director of Accelerate Cure/Treatments for Alzheimer’s Disease (ACT-AD), which hosted a panel discussion on precision medicine Monday. More than 5 million Americans suffer from Alzheimer’s disease today, and that number is expected to more than triple by 2050, Bens said. Click here to listen to the complete presentation.

Steven Huege, MD, associate program director of the University of Pennsylvania’s geriatric psychiatry fellowship program, has accepted a new role at the University of California, San Diego.

Dr. Huege will leave the Penn Memory Center after eight years to become director of the UCSD geriatric psychiatry fellowship program in May. He will divide his time between the San Diego VA and the university’s Senior Behavioral Health Program and Department of Psychiatry.

“This is a new phase of my career, and I’m looking forward to the opportunity to continue working with trainees in geriatric psychiatry,” said Huege, assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at Penn.

Huege began his current role with the Penn Memory Center in 2008 after completing his fellowship in geriatric psychiatry at Penn. He’s become increasingly involved in working with fellows and residents. He said working with the Penn Memory Center and its clinical trials has provided him with a “rich education in research.”

“I’m really very grateful for the opportunity to have worked with such a dynamic and supportive team. I really have learned tremendously from all of my colleagues,” he said. “This is a program that both provides excellent patient care in addition to research and outreach, and I’ve been very grateful to have been a part of that for eight years now.”

Huege received his undergraduate degree from Duke University and his MD from the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School. He completed a residency is psychiatry at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital before his fellowship at Penn.

NIA Director Richard Hodes (back left) speaks to clinicians and researchers from the University of Pennsylvania Feb. 1. (Photo by Nicolette Patete/Penn Institute on Aging)

In a rare visit to the University of Pennsylvania, National Institute on Aging Director Richard Hodes spoke highly of the university’s abundance of research collaborations and encouraged expansion in that format for future studies.

Dr. Hodes was on the Penn campus Feb. 1 to meet with researchers and clinicians working in the fields of aging, neuroscience, and immunology through a series of round-table discussions.

Penn clinicians stressed the importance they place on training the next generation of scientists and healthcare providers and creating pilot programs to fund the research of junior faculty members. Hodes said he applauds the abundance of collaborative research, like that conducted by the Penn Memory Center.

“I believe we presented Dr. Hodes with a close-up, in-depth look at a very broad and representative swath of all the aging and neuroscience research currently underway here at Penn that has the potential to influence our biological understanding of Alzheimer’s and related dementias now and into the future, and the clinical research and disease modifying therapies to help better treat, protect, and understand patients with AD and related dementias,” said Dr. John Trojanowski, director of the Penn Institute on Aging.

Click here to read complete coverage on the IOA website.