This is a full day with sessions providing an overview of the issue, legal issues and more.

September 23, 2011

8:30am-4:00pm

Royal Bank Theatre, Halifax Infirmary,QEII Health Sciences Centre (Capital Health)

Pre-registration ($50) Required by September 15, 2011

Registration Form Available From Peggy Hobbs (473-8603)

LIMITED SEATING. FIRST COME, FIRST SERVED

Founded in 1991 by Dr. Kenneth Rockwood, Geriatric Medicine Research (GMR) has pioneered an interdisciplinary approach to the study of aging, frailty and dementia that has allowed us to work with artists, philosophers, linguists, sociologists, applied mathematicians and data miners, just to name a few.

Innovative work being done by the GMR team here at Dalhousie University/Capital Health  includes tools and services to allow for a more responsive system of care for aging patients, as well as work into the effects of social vulnerability on health and mortality. We have also initiated a specialized clinic to help elderly patients understand the benefits and risks of treatments available to them.

Recent work has also begun to help better understand and provide for the needs of those who care for our expanding population of dementia patients, and we currently head up a cross-Canada network for knowledge translation in the field of dementia research.

GMR has a long history of research collaborations with groups as close as Ontario and as far flung as China.  We hope you will take a minute to look explore our site, the varied work we do, and the many groups who work with us.

Check out their blog here.

Notifbutwhen.ca

Are you a caregiver for someone with dementia who drives or recently stopped driving? Do you know someone in this situation? There is a new resource available for driving and dementia in Nova Scotia that helps caregivers understand when it may be time to hang up the keys, and offers useful information and strategies around this topic.

Did you know that in Nova Scotia, more than 5,000 people with dementia continue to drive, and that this number is expected to double over the next 10 years?

A recent public health campaign was designed to open lines of communication between people with dementia, their caregivers, and health care professionals when it comes to the difficult issue of driving. Geriatric Medicine Research in Halifax, in partnership with the Nova Scotia Health Research Foundation and the Alzheimer Society of Nova Scotia, invites you to take part in a short anonymous survey about driving and dementia.

The survey asks about your experience caring for a person with dementia who currently drives or recently stopped driving. All responses are anonymous and cannot result in any direct action or ramifications for you or the individual with dementia. The results of this survey are critical to help design future programs to support people with dementia and their caregivers as they navigate the issue of driving and dementia.

For more information, and a link to the survey, click here.

The full report is available on the website . The website contains a collection of evidence-based sleep resources for healthcare providers and caregivers of persons with dementia.

Downloadable patient education brochures about evidence-based sleep interventions are also provided. A PowerPoint presentation on the findings of this project and on sleep problems in persons with dementia can be accessed in the archives of the Canadian Dementia Resource and Knowledge Exchange website.

“Coping, Adapting, Enabling,Creating: Striking a Balance” Join persons with dementia, family members, professionals and other care partners in arelaxed setting to share and learn about coping with stigma and fear, adapting to change so as to enhance well-being, enabling persons with dementia, creating strong partnerships in dementia care and support.”

Place: Royal Bank Theatre, Halifax Infirmary 1796 Summer St.

Date: Saturday, April 30, 2011

Time: 8:30 a.m. to 12:00 p.m.

Cost to attend is free. Pre-registration required.

For more information or to register, please contact:

Alzheimer Society of NovaScotia

Phone: 422-7961 or1-800-611-6345.

Web: www.alzheimer.ns.ca

As part of this event, Dr. Kenneth Rockwood will be giving his annual Kathryn Allen Weldon Public Lecture on Alzheimer’s disease.

This year’s topic is “Why do people with Alzheimer’s disease have good days and bad days?”

Date:  September 27,2010

Time: 5:30pm Reception,  6:00pm Lecture

Place:  Atlantic Ballroom, Westin Nova Scotia Hotel, 1181 Hollis St, Halifax NS

All are welcome – this is a free, public lecture.

As the CBC reported, the panel expressed their doubt thus:

“We wish we could tell people that taking a pill or doing a puzzle every day would prevent this terrible disease, but current evidence doesn’t support this,” said Dr. Martha Daviglus, conference panel chair and professor of preventive medicine and medicine at Northwestern University in Chicago. The panel, however, said the public needs to understand such strategies are at best only loosely associated with an improved outcome. The cause-and-effect relationship, if any, is unclear, Daviglus said.

CAKEns contacted Dr. Kenneth Rockwood, a leading researcher into dementia who currently holds the Kathryn Allen Weldon Chair in Alzheimer’s research at Dalhousie University here in Nova Scotia, for comment on this.  His response:

There is a problem with these sorts of recommendations, which rely on “the evidence”.  The evidence is biased towards pharmacological interventions, which outnumber non-pharmacological interventions by hundreds to one.  So if the experts want to wait until there are multi-hundred person randomized controlled trials before daring to recommend exercise as a useful strategy in AD, we will wait a long time.  More valuable, it seems to me, are data from cohort studies, in which people who exercise and have AD can be compared against those who do not exercise, and have AD.  Although the design of a study like this means that we can never know for sure if exercise would work in people who take it up because they have AD, the data do allow some insight. (There are also elaborate reasons why we cannot know for sure from a randomized trial if the patient in front of us will benefit either, but that is another matter.)

Our analysis of data from the Canadian Study of Health and Aging suggests that there are cognitive benefits to exercise, even in people with dementia.  The open access reference for this work is: Middleton LE, Mitnitski A, Fallah N, Kirkland SA, Rockwood K.Changes in cognition and mortality in relation to exercise in late life: a population based study. PLoS One. 2008 Sep 1;3(9):e3124.

You can read the full report form the National Institutes of Health panel here.

In conjunction with Northwood’s Spring Conference, this free talk will take place  June 3, 7:00 – 8:00 p.m. at the QEII Royal Bank Theatre (in partnership with Centre for Health Care of the Elderly). The hour-long talk will focus on trends and approaches to person and family-directed care. 

For more information on the free public talk, call (902) 454-3391 or email at information@nwood.ns.ca

Dr. Tiffany Chow

Date: March 9^th

Time:7:00pm

Location: Royal Bank Theatre, Halifax Infirmary, 1796 Summer St.

Presenter:Tiffany Chow, MD
Clinician Scientist, Rotman Research Institute & Ross Memory Clinic,
Assistant Professor, Depts. of Medicine (Neurology Division) and Psychiatry (Geriatric Psychiatry Division), University of Toronto
Fellow, American Neuropsychiatric Association

This lecture is sponsored by the Canadian Dementia Knowledge Translation Network.

Currently in Canada, there are 103,700 new cases of dementia every year, or  1 every 5 minutes. This report suggests that by 2038, this will have risen to 257,800 new cases per year, or 1 every 2 minutes.

David Harvey, Principal Spokesperson for the Rising Tide project says “If nothing changes, this sharp increase in the number of people living with dementia will mean that by 2038, the total costs associated with dementia will reach $153 billion a year. This amounts to a massive cumulative total of $872 billion over this 30-year period.”

You can read the Alzheimer Society’s press release here, a summary of Rising Tide here and download the full report here.