Podcast – AAIC 2022 Day One

Voice Over:

Welcome to the NIHR Dementia Researcher Podcast brought to you by dementiaresearcher.nihr.ac.uk in association with Alzheimer’s Research UK and Alzheimer’s Society, supporting early career dementia researchers across the world.

Sarah Gregory:

Hello, and thank you for tuning into the Dementia Researcher Podcast on location from the Alzheimer’s Association International Conference in San Diego. I’m Sarah Gregory and today I’m guest hosting the first of four shows being recorded each day at the conference, sharing highlights with three fantastic guests each day. So today is all about the pre-conference and day one, but before we start, let’s make some introductions.

Sarah Gregory:

For those who don’t know me, I’m a part-time PhD student and a research fellow at the University of Edinburgh. My research is in the field of dementia prevention with my PhD focusing on stress and my research fellow work focusing on diet as potentially important risk factors for brain health. This is my fourth time to the AAIC conference in person, sixth if we include the last two years of virtual, and I’ve always had a great time. So I’m really excited to be hosting today for the first time and hearing about our guests’ highlights of the last two days. But that’s enough about me. I’m delighted to introduce the wonderful Dr. Lillian Hung, the amazing Dr. Riona McArdle, and the incredible Dr. Sarah-Naomi James. Hi, everyone. So Lillian, why don’t you go first and tell us about yourself.

Dr Lillian Hung:

Well, it’s really a fun time to be here with you all. I am Lillian, assistant professor in the School of Nursing at the UBC, University of British Columbia in Canada. My research looks at technology and a lot of implementations how we could use technology to support dementia care, mostly in long-term care and hospital. I have a lab. In the lab and we have a lot of fun. I bring a team of some of the young researchers here as well in the program. The lab, we have a lot of patient partners. We do co-research. So it’s a lot of fun.

Sarah Gregory:

Amazing. That sounds so interesting. And I think you’re going to tell us a little bit about the Technology PIA Day as well later.

Dr Lillian Hung:

Yes, it was a great day.

Sarah Gregory:

Brilliant. And Riona, you’ve been on the podcast a few times. What’s new?

Dr Ríona McArdle:

Yes. So my name is Riona McArdle. I am an NIHR advanced fellow now, which is a bit different than the last time I did this podcast, and my research really focuses on improving diagnosis and care of people living with dementia through novel applications of digital mobility assessment. I work quite a lot with technology, similarly to Lillian, and was also at the Tech Day. I’m also really, really interested in co-design and working and partnering with patients as well to create my research.

Sarah Gregory:

Amazing. Thank you. So we’ve got some really interesting similar themes coming through. Sarah, it’s your first time on the podcast. Can you introduce yourself?

Dr Sarah-Naomi James:

Yeah, it’s great to be here. I listen, but I haven’t been on it before, so this is exciting. I’m a research fellow at UCL funded by Alzheimer’s Research UK and my research looks at risk and protective factors on brain health, particularly earlier in midlife as well. I’ve been to a couple of pre-conference workshops here, which were around more of the risk factor side, so I’ve got some interesting insights to share there.

Sarah Gregory:

Amazing. Thanks, everyone. And so I think you probably all arrived before me, if you went to the pre-conferences. So when did you all get here? Are we all over the jet lag? Have you been able to do any sight seeing yet?

Dr Ríona McArdle:

I’m not over the PTSD of traveling, I have to say, but I have been on a boat to Coronado Island.

Sarah Gregory:

Amazing.

Dr Ríona McArdle:

That’s been quite nice. Where Marilyn Monroe shot a film, so that was quite good. That was my sightseeing experience.

Sarah Gregory:

Amazing. How about you guys?

Dr Sarah-Naomi James:

I flew. Actually, had quite a good experience. I feel quite lucky compared to everybody else. For jet lag, I’ve got a one-year-old son, so I’ve just come back from maternity leave. And so, actually, I feel like I’ve been good, like training for ages to go to sleep when I can. So, actually, I’m not too jet-lagged. I’m just able to sleep pretty well.

Sarah Gregory:

Amazing. So you’re just having a great time sleeping.

Dr Sarah-Naomi James:

Yes, having such a good time. I’m learning. I’m sleeping. Yeah.

Sarah Gregory:

Great. And how about you, Lillian? When did you arrive?

Dr Lillian Hung:

Because I’m not too far from Canada, so it was quite smooth. I came Friday and we had a lot of fun because the team came together. We are a bit of foodies, so we have been eating Mexican food. We went to the Little Italy, Italian food, and it was just the food that we had yesterday was just fantastic.

Sarah Gregory:

Seafood is-

Dr Lillian Hung:

The coconut margarita, I recommend it.

Sarah Gregory:

Amazing. I feel like I need to go out and get some sightseeing done, because I arrived late on Saturday night, so I haven’t been able to do much yet. But tonight onwards I’ll be able to explore. Have any of you been presenting at the conference yet? I think some of you have presented at the… Or maybe all of you have presented at the PIA Days, maybe? Should we go Lillian first? You want to say what you’ve been presenting?

Dr Lillian Hung:

Sure. We have a few projects, because we brought the team. We presented posters. We presented a telepresence robot project that we use in long-term care to support people who do virtual care. We also presented a talkie, which is a smart audio device that people used during the COVID outbreak for their family to stay connected with their loved ones in long-term care. Was a lot of fun.

Sarah Gregory:

Fantastic. Have you got kind of junior researchers from your group been able to present here as well?

Dr Lillian Hung:

Yeah. We also had other students that they presented. Actually, they presented a virtual format and they had those TVs in the exhibition hall. It was kind of, for us, it was like hybrid because some of the student went in person and then introduced some of the people on hybrid. We also have some poster today as well that we present the Overcoming Loneliness Project that we used telepresence robot to do interview with the residents in long-term care home, because we were not able to get in. So we had some of the older people that being the interviewer and the peer support person and interview the residents in the long-term care home. So that’s today.

Sarah Gregory:

Amazing. Busy time for your [inaudible 00:06:30]. Sarah Naomi, what have you been presenting or will be presenting?

Dr Sarah-Naomi James:

Sure. I presented at the Reserve and Resilience PIA Day on Saturday. And so I’ve been doing some work looking at some factors in the life, things like education, social class, childhood cognitive ability and how that can kind of buffer the effect or the cognitive expression of certain pathology. This is quite an active area of research and it’s been great to work with other collaborators across the world on this. I think what is novel about what we were showing is that we’re doing it in a sample of 70-year-olds, so they’re still not really showing severe signs of dementia. So we’re seeing a fairly cognitively normal sample that you can buffer the effects of things like amyloid hippocampal volume due to some of these kind of things that you can do in your life.

Sarah Gregory:

Amazing. Ri, what have you been presenting?

Dr Ríona McArdle:

I was presenting a poster at the Tech Day and I’m presenting on the same topic tomorrow on the Virtual Dementia Care Session. I was looking at the effect of local area deprivation on physical activity participation in people with dementia. We were essentially kind of interested in why do people stay physically active with dementia or why do they lose their physical activity? Most of the research has looked at cognition or disease-related factors, like movement problems. People haven’t really thought about those socioecological factors, like how does the environment someone lives in dictate if they can be physically active, but interestingly actually found that the more deprived areas that people live in, if you’re an old adult without dementia, that means that you are less physically active, the better… The less deprived areas that someone lives in, then you’re more physically active. But for people with dementia, there was no difference across those deprivation levels.

Dr Ríona McArdle:

So it’s nearly like the cognitive impairment itself might be a barrier or maybe all the other things that come with cognitive impairment, like carers might be worried about you leaving the house, you might be worried about getting lost if you leave the house, those kind of things probably have a big impact on your physical activity. It was a really interesting piece of work that I did with Dr. Calum Hamilton at Newcastle University and I’ll be presenting on that again tomorrow. And then I also, of course, with you have a workshop on Wednesday, which is partnering with patients and talking about research co-design and implementing PPI into your research.

Dr Sarah-Naomi James:

And is it my understanding that you won something?

Dr Ríona McArdle:

I did win the Best Poster for Post-doc, yes.

Dr Sarah-Naomi James:

[inaudible 00:09:13].

Sarah Gregory:

Congratulations.

Dr Ríona McArdle:

And a big surprise to me.

Sarah Gregory:

Amazing. That’s great news. So we’re going to jump into some of the topics that you’ve all been listening to over the last few days. The conference has been going on for a few days, if we include all the pre-conference sessions. We had the professional interest area days on Saturday. Should we start with those in terms of what you found interesting in addition to what you were all presenting, if there were key takeaways from it? We’ll go around in the same order. So, Lillian, what was the standout things that you saw on the Technology Day? What do you want to share with everyone?

Dr Lillian Hung:

The EDI, the equity and equality, that really struck me about the biases that how underrepresented the population, so often they are not included in the research and how it might impact decision making and how… Because we always talk about evidence inform practice and how people policy are being made. But if it’s only based on a small percentage of populations, it’s so unfair and so much needs to be done. So that really struck me, the [inaudible 00:10:33] phenomenon.

Dr Ríona McArdle:

I think there was a really great quote from [inaudible 00:10:37] that, actually, I think, to paraphrase it, it was something like the bias in your data set from recruiting participants leads to bias in your algorithms and that leads to bias in your clinical decision making. I think it really highlighted that even when we do try to recruit underserved groups, we actually end up with a biased sample of them as well. There was a talk by Heroko Dodge, where she talked about they’d actively tried to recruit African Americans into the study, but they found that the African Americans were less sad and less socially isolated than the rest of the sample. And they were like, “That’s probably not because that’s the situation.” It’s probably that they got some very, very keen beans who really like research and that kind of thing and actually we’re not getting very diverse group of minority groups when we do recruit.

Dr Ríona McArdle:

So it’s quite an interesting thing, because I think we’ve seen this all over this conference now, a lot of talk about diversity. But I thought it really highlighted that no matter if you’re trying to get your sample to be diverse, are you actually getting a diverse sample at the end of the day? Really interesting.

Dr Lillian Hung:

I was also very inspired about the assumption that people often made about because they can’t afford the device and we cannot include them in the sample. And they talked about that there are other ways, that you can find… To be creative, like repurpose some of the older device that people don’t use and think about if they have to work and think about other ways, like using maybe phones and other smart technology to help data collection.

Dr Sarah-Naomi James:

That’s really interesting. I went to a different workshop to you guys, but the theme was very similar, and it keeps coming up. I think, actually, across the conference this aspect of diversity affects all aspects of research, so what we were talking about. I actually started my conference on Friday. I went to Social Determinants of Health Workshop and there we were talking very much about not taking… So when we’re looking at risk factors we know there’s still lots of research to do, of course, looking at risk factors of dementia, thinking about how, what dose, that kind of thing. But we know enough now to know actually what’s good for brain health, diet, exercise, these kinds of things. And so we need to start working to promote these health behaviors, but we have to take into account where they’re living and try to really think about the communities that people are in and try to remove barriers that mean that they can’t do these things to reduce their dementia risk.

Dr Sarah-Naomi James:

And again and again, it kept coming up about the aspect of bringing in more diverse people. And what we need to do is start building communities of public health, researchers, community groups, and really try to find out why, what needs to be done, where people live, to mean that they can then make decisions and more of a individual choice to do things to improve their health. But for that to happen, we need the diverse groups and we need to have these conversations as well.

Dr Ríona McArdle:

Yeah. Really interesting area that keeps getting built on now. It’s really, really great to see.

Dr Lillian Hung:

Yeah. It could turn out to be quite not respectful and you trying to impose recommendations based on maybe very [inaudible 00:13:59] type of research. I’m thinking about there’s a project that we are doing on a smart TV at home that a lot of the program was created based on very white populations. And when we took it to the nursing home, the carer, staff, and the resident was saying that, “Uh-uh, we don’t want to watch this. This has no relevance to us.” So we ended up having our patient partners to make new videos saying they need to be talking about their language, taking their cultural context into considerations.

Dr Sarah-Naomi James:

That’s a great example.

Sarah Gregory:

Yeah. Really highlights the benefit of doing that co-design work.

Dr Lillian Hung:

Yes.

Sarah Gregory:

Definitely. And so the Alzheimer’s Association are clearly very invested in including people and improving access. How easy do you think that is to translate to Canada and the UK in terms of, is that as important to our funders? Is that as central, do you think? Do you include these issues in your research?

Dr Ríona McArdle:

I think it’s becoming more important. You certainly need to add EDI statements into your grants now. The NIHR have got the INCLUDE Campaign. That’s what it’s called. NIHR have the INCLUDE campaign, which is about representing underserved populations in your research and trying to create a framework of how you might be able to include them. It starts from the very top. You have to co-design with them, ask them, how would you like to be included in the research, what research is meaningful to you, and try and highlight that kind of research that is useful for underserved groups.

Dr Ríona McArdle:

It’s important also to think about who is an underserved person, because I think it was highlighted really well yesterday that often when we think about being inclusive, we think about minority groups, but actually it was mentioned at the Tech Day that it could be carers who just have to work and they just cannot get a person to an appointment, because they can’t leave their job. And so it’s really thinking about, basically, I think we think a lot of the time about retired white people, who’ve got the privilege of being able to move around. What about someone who can’t drive? What about someone who can’t afford a car? So I think it is becoming more of interest, but, I guess, I don’t know if researchers necessarily in the UK have that framework that’s very easy for them to adopt and try to include people or have those lessons that have been taught to them.

Dr Lillian Hung:

I think in Canada we are trying to follow the footstep [inaudible 00:16:32], but there’s still a lot work need to be done in the infrastructure to support. In Canada, we call it patient-oriented research. A lot of times the patients’ partners cannot be co-investigators or lead of the research. You guys have the patient lead research. We don’t have that. So there’s still a lot of things need to be done to promote that. But it’s really, really important work. And I think there’s a lot of interest and we have people living with dementia are very interested in co-leading research to be more actively involved in research.

Sarah Gregory:

Great. And coming to Sarah-Naomi, what did you find out from the Reserve and Resilience Day that you wanted to share with us or anything else in the Social Determinants of Health Day as well?

Dr Sarah-Naomi James:

I actually wrote on my notes that I wanted to raise the issue of diversity. We’ve already covered that. A very interesting session I went to around sex and gender issues in the PIA Day. And so the background to that is that we know that women have got an increased risk of developing dementia, above and beyond the fact that they are more likely to survive into older age. And so there’s lots of discussion around why is that. Is that to do with sex hormones? Is that to do with genetic factors and the downstream proteomics? Is it to do with the kind of social constructs? Especially thinking about women who are in older age now, they had different educational opportunities, like lack of educational opportunities.

Dr Sarah-Naomi James:

It was a really interesting topic about that. But the two people who were leading the session turned it into a debate and they concluded their remarks into song, which was very interesting. Dr. Rachel Buckley ended in singing a song about estrogen to the tune of Yesterday by the Beatles, which was… I think there’s a video of it somewhere on Twitter. And so it was really nice because it made the debate very lively. It’s definitely one that I’m going to remember. But there is obviously a serious undertone to the research and it was really great to collaborate, to network and bond over this very unique experience that we all saw.

Sarah Gregory:

I’ve seen the video on Twitter and it’s definitely worth watching. It is amazing. Brilliant. Ri, was there anything else from the Technology Day that you wanted to bring up and highlight?

Dr Ríona McArdle:

I think there was a real highlight talk was Arlene [inaudible 00:19:11]’s talk that she gave. It was looking at use of technology around cognition, really. She had different components that she’s talking about. One of them was she has got some work where they’ve done some technology-led reminiscence therapy, which was really interesting, songs or videos that people enjoyed and things. I learned so much from that. Things like general photos of a time period are actually really good, whereas personal photos can be quite confusing for a person with dementia. They might feel expected to remember something that they just don’t remember. But if you put a picture of Elvis up, they’ll have a lot of things to say about that. She said that basically when she’d started that reminiscence research, she thought this would probably be helpful to quality of life, that kind of thing, but it probably won’t be that helpful to cognition. And I believe that she found that actually did improve cognition and over 12 weeks it improved cognition again. So there’s this kind of aspect.

Dr Ríona McArdle:

Lillian, correct me on this, but I think she kind of thought it was to do with that interaction they were also having with the care staff in care homes and things, that they were working with them more, speaking to them more, having more conversations with them, and that was improving their cognition. Also, she did this great part around maintaining cognition and how we might use prompts to do that and use technology to lead the prompt. This is something that is very close to my heart and very interested in. It’s the kind of idea around helping people maintain their instrumental activities of daily living rather than them beginning to make mistakes and someone taking it off them.

Dr Ríona McArdle:

She used the example of someone mashing potatoes. She said that they did co-production research and they asked this woman, “What is it that you want to do?” And she said, “I want to be able to maintain making a Sunday dinner.” And they said, “That’s probably too difficult to do for a research project, so we’re going to go with mashed potatoes. We’re going to make sure you can mash potatoes.” It was quite cool the way that she did it, because she put up pictures of the woman going through all the steps of mashing potatoes. She peeled the potatoes. She put the potatoes into a pot and poured boiling water in. She cooked them, drained them and mashed them. In the pictures it looks like the woman can do that, absolutely no problem. But in reality, when they were watching her do it, at one point she lost the pot lid, couldn’t find the pot lid, couldn’t figure out where it was, found another pot lid that wasn’t correct and was too small for it, pulled out all of her saucepans to figure out what she should do. Eventually, the researcher prompted her and said, “The pot is there,” and she was able to maintain doing the task.

Dr Ríona McArdle:

And so what they were talking about was trying to, instead of a researcher being there, have a piece of technology that would say, “Oh, it’s just there,” and that might allow people to maintain that independence for longer. I thought that was just a really, really interesting piece, because we see that with people with dementia. They might start to be unable to do something and it might just be easier for a carer to do it for them. I’ve definitely spoken to my PPI contributors where they’ve said, “Oh, he’s not great at doing it, but I still want him to do it, because it’s important that he feels that he is contributing to the household in some way.” So I just thought that was absolutely fabulous talk, to be honest, and I got so much out of it. I’m going to stop gushing now.

Dr Lillian Hung:

I like what you said about that piece, that it was important to him. Like Arlene talk about it’s important to focus in on everyday things that matter to the person, right?

Dr Ríona McArdle:

Yeah.

Dr Lillian Hung:

Like there’s a lot of stigma, stereotyping in thinking about the people in long-term care and it’s the length of stay is short, then they don’t think about they want the fun things that will improve or maintain their conditions. And it’s not true. People get used to technology and that it can improve their quality of life and improve their condition, or at least maintain it. It’s worth it.

Dr Ríona McArdle:

Yeah, definitely.

Dr Sarah-Naomi James:

And so to what extent do they kind of want to personalize tech? Because it feels like that’s probably quite specific example that will only help a small amount of people. So what’s the idea around that?

Dr Ríona McArdle:

Honestly, I can’t remember what she said about that part. I was still on the mashed potatoes part, I think. So I’m not sure. Lillian might remember about that. But I think that they were kind of thinking about co-production with people with dementia to see where they would go with that kind of next step. But it was more that there is an opportunity that technology could address it and we need to think about what is important to people with dementia. This always comes up, especially in consensus reviews, Delphi consensus, maintaining independence and being able to do things that matter to a person are the most important things for them and the kind of way that we set things up don’t really look at that. You know what I mean? So I think it’s quite novel and interesting if we can get something that would help, but not sure.

Dr Lillian Hung:

And I think with tech, there’s a lot of opportunity to do that personalization work. For example, the [inaudible 00:24:03] that Arlene does that you can personalize the content, right?

Dr Ríona McArdle:

[inaudible 00:24:07]-

Dr Lillian Hung:

It’s the family videos and it’s photographs of the family, of the pet, or something like that. I went to one of the exhibition hall. It was so much fun. One of the vendor had a program. It’s a very simple program that you can just go to the iPad and you can voice record simple questions, like what are some of the things that I really enjoy in my life, and then they could turn into kind of like a care plan and that makes it really easy. It’s that piece that you talked about, like helping people to have relationship. When they talk about the reminisce, then you get to know the person and that’s really key to person-centered care, right?

Dr Ríona McArdle:

Yeah.

Dr Lillian Hung:

Yeah.

Sarah Gregory:

It sounds so interesting. The Technology Day just sounds great, as do all of the pre-conference PIAs.

Dr Ríona McArdle:

The best pre-conference, really.

Sarah Gregory:

Did anyone have anything from the first official day of the conference that they wanted to talk about? Any sessions that you went to that were standouts or really interesting that you wanted to share?

Dr Ríona McArdle:

I guess, I went to one on… I’m not going to say this correctly… nomenclature. I think that’s what it was called. But it was kind of they had done some co-production work with patient groups around the term dementia or Alzheimer’s disease. I thought it was really interesting, actually, because they talked about how patients were very confused about terminology. They were confused about Alzheimer’s. They thought that might be separate to dementia. Mild cognitive impairment, they felt that was a strange diagnosis to get, because it doesn’t seem that bad. It’s only mild. We’ve seen this come up in some of our PPI work as well and actually it’s come up systematic review that I’ve got an undergraduate student presenting on the Dementia Care Session tomorrow about the impact of mild cognitive impairment, where they were just very confused by that term but very worried about dementia.

Dr Ríona McArdle:

In the session they were talking about there’s a lot of ways that we talk about Alzheimer’s disease. We might talk about Alzheimer’s as Alzheimer’s disease, but we might also talk about instead of saying the word dementia people say Alzheimer’s or they say Alzheimer’s dementia and related disorders, which is very confusing for people. Or we talk about it in a pathology kind of sense. And people think that if you’ve got MCI that you’re going to progress to Alzheimer’s instead of dementia or any form of dementia that you might get. So they were talking about maybe changing that term and changing it to, I think it was like older adult neurocognitive disorders or something like that, and trying to co-produce with people to make sure it was less stigmatizing, that it was more understandable, that clinicians could explain what it was instead of always falling back into that lump of Alzheimer’s and Alzheimer’s-related disorders. I thought that was actually quite interesting.

Dr Ríona McArdle:

I have a caveat in where I think if it is used in diagnosis, it probably will just become stigmatizing again later on, because I feel like that’s what always ends up happening. But I certainly see that, even when I talk to my parents. They really mix up the Alzheimer’s and dementia thing and they’re not sure what they’re talking to me about and things like that. So I think raising more awareness around the kind of terminology is really important.

Sarah Gregory:

Really interesting, especially when the term Alzheimer’s is used in branding for charities, conferences.

Dr Ríona McArdle:

Yes.

Sarah Gregory:

It’s kind of used very publicly, but it is a bit of a kind of, what is it? What does it mean? Even within us, we might all have a different way that we use these terms and things. That sounds fascinating. Sarah-Naomi, did you have any sessions you wanted to talk about [inaudible 00:27:41]?

Dr Sarah-Naomi James:

Yeah. I went to a couple of the epidemiology sessions yesterday. And again, they’re kind of just building on our knowledge. There were a couple of sessions looking at cardiovascular risk factors, but now in more diverse populations. There’s some really great work going on in Brazil and there’s some cohorts in more of the Latino countries. But just showing, actually, that the cardiovascular risk is increased anyway, so we of course would then expect the disparity in the outcome if there’s going to be disparity in the exposure. So just emphasizing the point that it’s really important to look at these communities and I feel like the take-home message is definitely we know enough now, I think, about some things we can do and we need to… There’s lots more research around the mechanisms, but we definitely need to make things happen a bit more more easily for people to take risk reduction measures.

Sarah Gregory:

Yeah, great. Lillian, was there anything from yesterday that you wanted to highlight or any posters at all?

Dr Lillian Hung:

Yesterday, I actually went to the beach.

Sarah Gregory:

Lovely. That sounds like a great choice.

Dr Lillian Hung:

In the morning, I did look at some of the poster and there was one poster from Australia that looked at dementia-friendly communities. That was very interesting. Then she interviewed some of the community planner to see how, what can be done to better support people living in the community.

Dr Ríona McArdle:

Was that the poster to do with dementia-friendly communities and government where they were trying to get government to push them?

Dr Lillian Hung:

Yeah.

Dr Ríona McArdle:

I thought that was really interesting, actually. I thought that one as well.

Dr Lillian Hung:

I’m always interested in how, as like the question they asked on the Tech Day about as a scientist, how could we better work with policymakers and governments to make a biggest impact, because I encountered a lot of difficulties that I want to include people that they don’t have access to wifi. It makes it very challenging to do. Even in the nursing home that you can have certain areas that have really good wifi and across the next room that has no wifi, then that person could not put the telepresence robot there because there’s no wifi.

Dr Ríona McArdle:

It’s such an important thing, isn’t it? Because I think that we don’t think about that very often, that a lot of people don’t have access to wifi, because it’s such an [inaudible 00:30:15]. Like in the UK, there’s an Ofcom report that says that 40% of people over, I think it’s 65, don’t have a smartphone, so they couldn’t possibly use it when we design these apps for smartphones and all those kind of things. So it’s really interesting, because that is something that’s a government push of free, accessible wifi to everyone of at least a basic standard. I thought that was a really good question and there wasn’t really an answer for it. But I think it would be so interesting to have a session at something like AAIC about working with policymakers, because we do this at Newcastle University. We’ve got a Policy Academy, which I was part of, and you do nine months of training of how to interact with policy. So either-

Dr Lillian Hung:

So wonderful.

Dr Ríona McArdle:

It was amazing. So either the government, the local community, the NHS, and they bring in professors and researchers who have worked with policy and have successfully implemented things in. They all have different stories about how they did it, but kind of the main thing that I noticed coming out of those for medical research was the patient voice and getting the patients to advocate for you. I’ve gone off on a bit of a tangent [inaudible 00:31:22]. But they had Professor Roy Taylor talking about his diabetes work and his diabetes intervention, which reduces your, I think it’s type 2 diabetes, to a point actually where it’s gone, you don’t have it anymore. But it was very hard for them to push that through and what he did was he wrote a book on it.

Dr Ríona McArdle:

He got patients to talk about it. They went into their doctors and they said, “I could have this intervention while you’re not offering me this intervention.” And now it is an intervention in the NHS because of that. So I think it would be great to see people who have changed policy for dementia and hear their stories at a day like an Alzheimer’s Association Day.

Dr Lillian Hung:

Policy Academy?

Dr Ríona McArdle:

Yeah.

Dr Lillian Hung:

That’s what we need.

Dr Ríona McArdle:

Policy Academy.

Sarah Gregory:

Yeah, it sounds so interesting.

Dr Ríona McArdle:

It’s so cool, honestly. It’s such a cool little thing Newcastle University do. And you learn so much about government structures, things that I would just never know, like how the UK government actually influence policy, how you can speak to them, the ways that you can address them and that kind of thing. And it will be completely different internationally for different places, but it would be really, really cool to see how people do it.

Dr Sarah-Naomi James:

That’s so important. It feels like we need to be doing that work in parallel, doesn’t it? Alongside developing our work. We talked a lot about this in the Social Determinants of Health Workshop. We were talking particularly, one of the risk factors with the most evidence of risk reduction is hypertension and we know enough now to know that we need to start doing more to reduce hypertension in the community. We have the medication for it. So why aren’t we doing it? Why aren’t we getting better? I feel like that’s a very clear example where actually we know what we need to do as scientists, but then we need other people to help implement it. We need the targets, we need the clinicians to even get that message, we need people of course then to hopefully take a bit of the responsibility and ask them for that as well. The science is there now. And so we need to build on that with other people to make it into practice.

Dr Ríona McArdle:

Yeah.

Sarah Gregory:

Brilliant. Well, that’s all we have time for today. I think it’s been really interesting that the same themes have basically come up across all days, equality, diversity, inclusion, and co-design being at the center of what we do. It’s really nice to see those themes going throughout the whole conference. So as ever, you can find Twitter links and bios for today’s guests on the Dementia Researcher website at dementiaresearcher.nihr.acuk. So it’s time to end today’s podcast recording. I’d like to thank our guests, Dr. Lillian Hung, Dr. Riona McArdle and Dr. Sarah-Naomi James. Please remember to subscribe and come back tomorrow for more reflections from day two of the conference. You’ll find a massive amount of information on social media using the hashtag #AAIC2022 or #AAIC22. You can also go to alz.org/aaic for more information and potentially watch a 360 video version of this podcast on YouTube. Thank you, everyone.

Voice Over:

Brought you by dementiaresearcher.nihr.ac.uk in association with Alzheimer’s Research UK and Alzheimer’s Society, supporting early career dementia researchers across the world.

 

END