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Theatre of Witness, an innovative story-telling group, focusing on deep listening and creative expression, is preparing for a six-week workshop at Ralston House.

Theatre of Witness is “a form of theater in which the true stories of people whose voices haven’t been heard are performed by the people themselves as a way for audiences to bear witness and humanize the other,” explained founder Teya Sepinuck.

Partnering with the Penn Memory Center and ARTZ Philadelphia, Sepinuck plans to bring together caregivers and loved ones living with dementia for six workshops 5:30 to 7 p.m. on Wednesdays from April 6 to May 11.

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.