Blog: The Brain Dialogues, filtered by tag: Sydney Memory and Ageing Study

HEIDI DOUGLASS | h.douglass@unsw.edu.au Two of UNSW’s School of Psychiatry and Centre for Healthy Brain Ageing (CHeBA) academics, Professor Brian Draper and Professor Julian Trollor, were acknowledged for significant contributions to psychiatry at the recent RANZCP Congress held on Monday, 13th May 2019. Professor Brian Draper, a Chief Investigator on CHeBA’s Sydney Memory & Ageing Study, was awarded the RANZCP’s College Medal of Honour for his outstanding contribution to psychiatry as a clinician and researcher, and for his extensive and continuous service to the RANZCP. Established in… Read More

DR ANNE-NICOLE CASEY How people interact with and perceive one another, and each person’s thoughts and feelings about the quality of those interactions and relationships, can affect physical and mental health and well-being. Social cognitive function, which broadly refers to the way our brain processes social information, is recognised as an important marker of how efficiently our brain processes information in general1. Interestingly, the number of individuals with whom a person interacts frequently is associated with their short-term memory capacity2. Some studies report that having larger… Read More

PROFESSOR PERMINDER SACHDEV This article was first published in InformAge, Volume 2, Issue IV December 2015 (Summer). Dementia is a global problem, and there is a worldwide effort to identify risk and protective factors, determine early biomarkers, and develop novel treatments for dementia. A survey of the international research scene reveals that many groups are working in relative isolation on projects that are similar to research conducted elsewhere. Very often, the individual projects are not large enough to provide conclusive answers to complex research questions. A recent… Read More

HEIDI DOUGLASS | h.douglass@unsw.edu.au There are currently approximately 320,000 people in Australia with dementia, with that number set to rise to almost one million by 2050, and 115 million globally. These predictions mean that not only do we need a clear plan to make care available for so many people with dementia, but we also need to pursue prevention strategies vigorously. Prevention of dementia depends largely upon research, and beyond the necessities of funding, equipment, and academics with the right skill base to perform the research we need one extra thing: brains. "Even before… Read More