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In the current issue of The Pennsylvania Gazette you’ll find Penn Memory Center‘s Dr. Jason Karlawish’s review of Nobel Prize winning researcher Stanley Prusiner’s memoir, “Madness and Memory: The Discovery of Prions—A New Biological Principle of Disease.”  The memior traces Prusiner’s journey from his Midwestern boyhood to his 1997 Nobel Prize in Physiology/Medicine for his work determining prions as among the causes of neurological diseases.. Prusiner is now director of the Institute for Neurodegenerative Diseases and professor of neurology at the University of California, San Francisco.

In the review, Dr. Karlawish asks, “In the life of the scientist, is there life outside of science?”

You can read the review here.

Starting in 2015, Medicare will pay monthly fees to doctors who manage care for patients with two or more chronic conditions. This is a policy change initiated by the Obama administration.

In an interview in the New York Times, Marilyn B. Tavenner, the administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services said, “Paying separately for chronic care management services is a significant policy change.”  The article noted that care coordination could pay for itself by keeping patients healthier and out of hospitals.

“This is great news for our patients at the Penn Memory Center,” says Jason Karlawish, MD, Associate Director of the Penn Memory Center.

“Persons with Alzheimer’s disease and other cognitive disorders typically have other common medical illnesses as well. Taking care of them requires organizing and coordinating information, and communication among disciplines and the patient’s family. It’s a rewarding part of practicing medicine but it’s time intensive.”

You can read the New York Times article here.

A study published in JAMA Neurology on August 11, 2014, suggests that minimizing apoE gene levels in the brain may be an approach to developing a treatment for Alzheimer’s disease. In the study, researchers found that a man with no apolipoprotein E, or apoE, in his body was cognitively normal and showed no neurological signs of Alzheimer’s. Those with a mutation of the gene called apoE4 have a higher risk of developing Alzheimer’s. You can read the study here.

The Philadelphia Inquirer reported on ARTZ Philadelphia’s programming for people with dementia, and the organization’s relationship with the Penn Memory Center. The organization’s goal is to serve, through arts and culture, people with Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia. The Penn Memory Center is working closely with the organization to spread the word about its museum tours and arts activities. You can read the Philadelphia Inquirer article here.

Alzheimer’s disease experts are testing an unusual approach to the disease: giving the brain what may be a more efficient source of energy. In people with Alzheimer’s and other dementias, the brain loses its ability to properly metabolize glucose early in the course of disease. Several sites are now testing AC-1204, a vanilla-flavored white powder that supplies a type of triglycerides. Steven Arnold, MD, director of the Penn Memory Center, said he was skeptical of the “alternative energy” argument. “Why dying cells can use this energy source better than glucose has never been clear to me,” he told the Philadelphia Inquirer.

You can read the Philadelphia Inquirer article here.

USA Today, citing a Finnish study presented on Sunday, July 13, 2014 at the Alzheimer’s Association International Conference in Denmark, says that everyday health activities can reduce someone’s risk of memory decline. The study is the first to examine the impact of the combination of eating well, exercising, keeping mentally and socially engaged, and managing obesity, high blood pressure and diabetes; other studies have looked at pieces of healthy lifestyles, but not the combination.

You can read the USA Today article here.

An article in the June 2014 issue of Managed Care examines the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force’s recent recommendation declaring that there is currently insufficient evidence to recommend early cognitive screening.

Author Susan Worley interviewed a number of experts in the field of Alzheimer’s disease treatment and research including Jason Karlawish, MD, professor of medicine, medical ethics, and health policy at the University of Pennsylvania, and Associate Director of the Penn Memory Center.

“Cognitive screening in a general population is obviously wrong,” says Dr. Karlawish. “Screening really must be focused on an older population. The lower we set the age, the more we increase the chance of false positive detection. I’m in favor of screening when the probability that you are going to pick up cognitive impairment is reasonably high, and that is in the setting of practices that care for older adults. Among geriatricians, I would say, it is a fairly standard practice to assess your patients’ cognition.”

You can read the article here.

American seniors have lost an estimated $2.9 billion in financial scams in the last decade, and financial institutions need to do more to protect them, experts suggested at a meeting on Monday. June 16.

Jason Karlawish, MD, professor of Medicine and Medical Ethics and Health Policy, told the Philadelphia Inquirer that this is a public health problem and called for a “reboot” of the financial services industry.

“Who are these people selling stuff to seniors as their job?” he asked at a panel on financial abuse of the elderly, sponsored by the United Way in Center City. Though he hates the terms, he said, such people should become “senior certified” or “senior friendly.”

You can read the Philadelphia Inquirer article here.

The A4 study is underway to see if an experimental drug can protect healthy seniors whose brains harbor silent signs that they’re at risk. On June 9, a Rhode Island man was hooked up for an IV infusion at Butler Hospital in Providence, the first treated. The $140 million study, funded by the National Institutes of Health, Eli Lilly & Co., and others, will track if participants’ memory and amyloid levels change over three years. The study is enrolling participants at more than 60 sites, including the Penn Memory Center. In an AP article published in June, Dr. Jason Karlawish, Associate Director of the Penn Memory Center, and a designer of the study’s psychological precautions, calls the research “an opportunity to study the future of the way we’re going to think about, talk about and live with the risks of Alzheimer’s disease.” You can read the AP article here.