Blog: The Brain Dialogues, filtered by tag: Dementia statistics

STEPHANIE CAMPBELL, CHeBA CHAMPION (FITNESS AMBASSADOR FOR CHeBA) I’m jogging up a ridiculously steep street in Sydney’s leafy, bayside suburb of Mosman. My knees ache, my quads are burning, and my lungs hurt from straining for air. No point pretending – I hate uphill. Forehead glistening with sweat, I grit my teeth and finally reach the crest, attempting to breathe through a massive stitch in my side as I take the pace back down to a steady walk to recover. The oversized Garmin fitness watch strapped to my left wrist bleeps encouragingly at me to signal I’ve covered another kilometre, and… Read More

PROFESSOR PERMINDER SACHDEV and PROFESSOR HENRY BRODATY, CO-DIRECTORS, CHeBA There is a worldwide effort to identify risk and protective factors, establish biomarkers and develop novel treatments for mild cognitive impairment (MCI), dementia and geriatric depression. Over the last decade, our group has been a leading contributor to this effort. We established five longitudinal studies of cognitive ageing and dementia along multiple lines of investigation which include neuroepidemiology, neuropsychology, neuroimaging, genetics/genomics, proteomics, stem cells, metabolomics and… Read More

PROFESSOR PERMINDER SACHDEV, MD, PhD It’s rare to hear good news about dementia, so two recent reports showing it may be becoming less common created a fair amount of excitement.  Not a week goes by without some new promised therapy for dementia having failed in a clinical trial. The joke in dementia circles is that “the cure for dementia is only five years away, but will always remain five years away”.  But things perked up considerably when the reports in the prestigious medical journal Lancet showed that dementia rates seem to be declining. Study on Prevalence The first report was from… Read More

HEIDI DOUGLASS | h.douglass@unsw.edu.au It's official. Centenarians are the fastest growing demographic in Australia, which means that the likelihood of living to 100 and beyond is increasing exponentially. Today, females born in a Western country have a 40% chance of reaching 100. And the odds are increasing. Much of this is, of course, down to advances in medical science and its ability to keep our bodies functioning far longer than that of our predecessors.....but what about our brains? With an ageing population comes a myriad of implications, good and bad. Positively, we get to live… Read More