Podcast – AAIC 2022 Day Three

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.

Dr Sarah Bauermeister:

Hello and welcome to the Dementia Research podcast, on location from Alzheimer’s Association International Conference in San Diego. So I’m Dr. Sarah Bauermeister. And today I have the pleasure of guest hosting the third of these special podcasts, sharing highlights with three fantastic early career research guests. So today, we’re going to cover the third day of the conference, but before we start, let me make some introductions. So those who don’t know me, I am Dr. Sarah Bauermeister, I’m a senior scientist at the University of Oxford, where I run a program looking at early adversity and dementia, and I’m also senior data manager for Dementias Platform UK. So let’s move on to our brilliant guests. I’m delighted to introduce Esther Hui, Dr. Claire Lancaster and Dr. Darina Petrovsky. Hi everybody.

Dr Claire Lancaster:

Hello.

Esther Hui:

Hi.

Dr Darina Petrovsky:

Hi.

Dr Sarah Bauermeister:

Okay, so let’s get on with your introductions. So Esther, tell us a little bit about yourself.

Esther Hui:

Hi everyone. So I’m Esther and I’m a final year PhD candidate at University College London. I make and test psychosocial interventions for people with dementia. So for my PhD, I developed a virtual individual cognitive simulation therapy, which is a facilitator delivered and 14th version of ICSC that’s virtual. And I kind of tested it in Hong Kong as well as the UK. And I’m submitting my thesis in a month.

Dr Sarah Bauermeister:

Well, congratulations on the pending submission and thank you. It’s really interesting field. So Claire, I know you’re a regular on these Roundup shows. So any tips you can offer, do let me know. You go ahead and introduce yourself, please.

Dr Claire Lancaster:

So I’m an Alzheimer’s Society research fellow working at the University of Sussex. I’m interested in the kind of cognitive consequences of functional hyperactivity or aberrant hyperactivity in carriers of a genetic risk variant. I mainly focus on people who are healthy and in midlife because I’m really interested in preventative strategies and I’m currently looking at an anti epileptic to see if taking a very low dose of it can actually improve cognition in people who are at risk.

Dr Sarah Bauermeister:

Ah, nice. Very, very interesting. I must talk to you about our neuro deficit poster that we had up the other day and see what overlap we have with your work. So Darina, can I come to you now? And maybe you can also tell us about your new role in iStart.

Dr Darina Petrovsky:

Sure. So thank you so much for having me on here. My name is Darina Petrovsky. I’m an assistant professor and nurse scientist at Rutgers University School of Nursing and the Institute for Health, Health Care Policy and Aging Research at Rutgers. I just finished my first year as a faculty member, so very exciting. And prior to that, I was a postdoc at the University of Pennsylvania in the U.S., as well as NYU on New York University. My work center is around music based interventions for older adults, living with dementia and their caregivers. Right now, in my current project, I’m testing and developing mobile based application, music based application for this population. And this is actually my first time attending AIC in person, although you would think that I should have been here all these years since this is my area of work, but I’m really excited to attend.

Dr Darina Petrovsky:

And then to answer your second part of the question. Yes, so I started as a programs chair under the PEERs PIA with iStart. So my responsibilities are going to be primarily on organizing webinars and other events related to promote careers of early career researchers. So glad to be here.

Dr Sarah Bauermeister:

Oh, well, welcome. And fantastic news on your faculty position. Well done for that, and it looks like you’re going to have a really busy time ahead of you with the iStart work as well. So let’s get down to business. What I’m going to ask you a little bit about is what do you think of San Diego? Any comments from any of you?

Dr Claire Lancaster:

I absolutely love it. It’s really relaxed, it’s really fun, it’s really beautiful. Yeah. Big fan.

Dr Sarah Bauermeister:

Great. Any other comments?

Dr Darina Petrovsky:

I’m amazed by how many steps I’m able to get in everyday. And I was just talking with somebody at breakfast that they’re averaging about 10,000 steps and I think given maybe it was strategic in terms of the planning committee organized it. So I really like the open space here and obviously I love the water and the boats and everything. So that’s been really exciting. I’m staying about a mile away from the convention center, so actually, I’m glad I did that because I’m kind of exploring more of San Diego outside of what’s on the waterfront. So this is my second time in the city and it’s very exciting. It’s beautiful.

Dr Sarah Bauermeister:

Lovely. I can attest to the steps. I think I did 29,000 the other day looking for a T-shirt because I didn’t bring enough clothes. I packed a bit too light.

Dr Darina Petrovsky:

Says no one ever.

Dr Sarah Bauermeister:

Yes. So Esther, what do you think is San Diego?

Esther Hui:

Yeah. It’s really nice. I like that we are by the water always. Because I’m from Hong Kong I love water. So it was nice that we’re close by. I really like this venue as well, it is quite spacious. So if we want to have meetings with other people, during the conference, it’s very easy to find a spot.

Dr Sarah Bauermeister:

Yeah. I must say the venue has been fantastic and I think I’ve been spoiled with the morning runs along the seafront. I don’t know how I’m going to get back used to running in Oxford again. So right, this is a question to all of you actually, and feel free to speak about your presentations. Have any of you presented at the conference and would you like to tell me a little bit about your presentation?

Esther Hui:

Yeah. So I presented on my main PhD study yesterday as opposed to presentation and I think it should be still online. So I ran a feasibility randomized control trial in the UK for the virtual individual chronic to simulation therapy. So the presentation is on that. So we found that it’s feasible and also acceptable to run the study, so if you are interested to know more, you can find it on the AIC website. So my intervention is essentially a hybrid of CST and also iCST and then merge it together and put in a virtual platform unlike before. Because the original iCST was [inaudible 00:08:07] delivered, but this one is different because it’s facilitated delivered and we do see effect size and quality function that’s similar to the original CST, but I can’t really say too much because it’s obviously very underpowered, so we need a larger trial to find out more.

Dr Sarah Bauermeister:

Oh well fantastic. And has the response to your research been very positive in general?

Esther Hui:

Yeah, so far. I’m amazed at the amount of people that actually came up to me and wanted to talk about it. So I’m glad I printed out four pieces of versions of it so I can just hand out.

Dr Darina Petrovsky:

I commend you for whipping out poster upon command. When I met you yesterday evening, you just said, “Oh well here’s my poster, here you go.” More information, so take note, anybody who is listening to have your business card and perhaps a copy of your poster nearby. Good job.

Dr Sarah Bauermeister:

Yeah. Well done on that. Anyone else wants to tell the listeners about a presentation they’ve given here or a talk or even a conversation?

Dr Claire Lancaster:

I presented on Sunday and again, it was a poster. I was presenting the results of a web based cognitive study. So we were looking at mnemonic discrimination performance in about 400 middle aged people grouped by APOE genotype. So I was really interested in this because mnemonic discrimination reliably correlates with patterns of functional hyperactivity in the hippocampus and counter to my hypotheses that E force would show impairments in mnemonic discrimination. Their performance was remarkably similar to the [inaudible 00:09:56] and it was really large sample size. So I was quite surprised, but probably suggest there’s no effect in midlife, which in itself is very interesting.

Dr Sarah Bauermeister:

That’s really interesting. And so possibly do you think if you just go up and into older age, you might find those facts?

Dr Claire Lancaster:

I would think so. So my next step is to do a larger lifespan study because I mainly focus on kind of young adults and mid-age adults, but definitely extending it to a wider population and kind of looking at how different kind of lifestyle characteristics exacerbate kind of detrimental effects of the gene is what I’m really interested in doing next.

Dr Sarah Bauermeister:

Fantastic. Really interesting. Anyone else, wants to tell us about before we start going over some of the highlights of the conference?

Dr Darina Petrovsky:

I have not presented this time. I really wanted to see sort of what the conference is about first. But I definitely, I was really impressed by… I have been impressed by all the posters and the presentations. So now I’m definitely excited to submit some of my work next year and the following year. So, since I’m not presenting, I try to maximize my time here and really use it for networking and meeting individuals because that is something that I’ve been deprived of given the pandemic.

Dr Sarah Bauermeister:

It’s incredibly valuable to do that. So as you said, even if you’re not presenting, the networking, the collaborative talks that you have with each other. And also I think sometimes if you’re not presenting, just attending frees you up to pick and choose your talks, the posters you want to look at without thinking, “Oh, I’ve got to present.” So I think I’d really want to encourage listeners to attend the conference irrespective of whether they’re presenting or not, especially early career researchers and students.

Dr Darina Petrovsky:

Yeah. I was going to add, I’m pretty fortunate that I have the funds to attend here even if I’m not presenting. But I understand that for some students, as a… In my case, when I was a PhD student, sometimes you had to present in order to receive funding to attend the conference. So this is, I’m very fortunate to have the funding, but absolutely, you have to take it all in.

Dr Sarah Bauermeister:

Yeah. Make the most of a rich and diverse conference. So now I’m going to go around the table and I’m going to go first with Esther. And I’m going to ask each of you just to share a couple of highlights from the conference that really struck out to you as being exciting or special. So for example, I saw a poster, I actually tweeted the poster, looking at ethnic diversity and I’m running workshops this year funded by AR UK in the black, African and Caribbean community, trying to engage this population in dementia research. So I was really excited to see this poster, recognizing that we really need to address ethnic diversity, both in cohort populations, but also in our research. So that was my highlight, I think so far. So Esther, do you have a couple of highlights that you might want to talk about?

Esther Hui:

Yeah. So I am an ethnic minority. So things about that always stand out to me. So I think there was, plenary talk on homelessness and also aging and homelessness. And I think what shocked me about that whole… There are a lot of really good highlights from that presentation. But I think one statement really stood out to me was housing is medicine and it was shocking to me that minorities were affected. I think the figures were like three to four fold more than others. So that really like stood out to me. And yeah. So that was one of the highlights from that particular presentation. And I also went to the presentation on dementia care research interventions in dementia. So I was just quite amazed at the different types of nonpharmacological interventions that were included from like TDCS different telehealth interventions, VR. Yeah. And it’s also what I guess, something that stood out to me was a lot of these were actually feasible and acceptable. Like the VR was quite skeptical about VR therapy for people dementia initially.

Dr Darina Petrovsky:

Do you mean a virtual reality?

Esther Hui:

Yeah. Virtual reality. Sorry. A virtual reality therapy, but I was like, “Oh, like this actually seems to be working.” So yeah. That stood out to me. And also the though there was one presentation on preventing loss of independence through exercise. I think it was a from UCSF. I think what they had a clinical meaningful results for wellbeing, mobility, caregiver isolation, caregiver self-regulation, which was quite positive. And that they also found that there are like new benefits to actually moving the intervention from in person to online. I think they… I don’t remember very clearly, but I think they started out probably in person and then switch it to online. And that was quite encouraging too, that there are new benefits from moving an intervention online because I do like virtual intervention. So that also stood out to me.

Dr Sarah Bauermeister:

Fantastic. I think that if we can move interventions to online, we suddenly can reach such a wider audience, I think. And it’s just so much easier because if we think of people who are cognitively impaired, it’s really difficult for them to travel and to get to places. So suddenly I think the use of virtual reality and online interventions is really, really important. And it’s very exciting to see that this is no longer just, “Oh, we are not sure if it’s the same.” But moving forward is a positive impact. Yeah.

Dr Darina Petrovsky:

For sure. There was a presentation, I think on Monday I want to say the days have blurred together, but a presentation from the fingers network. Right. I don’t know if you’ve attended that. But one of the speakers presented adherence rates to the intervention sort of pre COVID when they were in person transitioning to virtual and they’ve shown from the figures that he’s shown. I think that the adherence was actually very comparable to in person. This is I believe an individual’s with cognitive impairment and in one of the, I think adherence to… I forget whether it was physical exercise or one of the interventions was actually higher, a sort of virtually wise. And so they’ve concluded that even though pandemic has caused a lot of the sort of natural experiments to occur in this space, that there were still encouraging findings, that there were still able to adhere and fidelity was still high in when moving to an online format. So yeah. I wonder if there’s going to be a lot of reviews and systematic reviews published on this topic as this sort of natural experiment unfolded in front of us.

Dr Sarah Bauermeister:

It’s interesting because I think, I wonder if simply that… We became an online world didn’t we? During the pandemic. And so that perhaps looking at virtual reality as an intervention and online assessment and interventions, it’s much more readily accessible now simply because of, “Oh, it’s easy to go online or it’s acceptable to go online.” And I think that’s interesting to look at in itself. I don’t know how you would look at that. Don’t want to bring back another pandemic just to test it out. But any other highlights from the conference that really struck you?

Dr Darina Petrovsky:

Sure. I mean, I did also enjoy the homelessness and dementia talk yesterday. Just when the speaker opened up about just by going outside of the convention hall, not too far from here, this problem obviously exists. The session that I went to yesterday so was outside of the scientific sessions, but it was, I think we were both at, with Esther. It was organized by the aware [inaudible 00:18:38]. So the women in science, in this space and we had breakfast, I think a day before. And yesterday, there was a panel of three very distinguished women scientists. And they talked about sort of their windy roads of their careers. And they’ve shared some of the challenges and some of the highlights, some of the good things that happened. And we really had… Even though the room was very big and there was a lot of attendees, it did feel more intimate.

Dr Darina Petrovsky:

And you really had a chance to ask a lot of questions that you otherwise would not be able to ask. And so that was really truly highlight because I joined obviously the PEERs PIA and I’m very passionate about early… Promoting career researchers, but obviously, women in science is another topic that I’m really passionate about. So I really, really enjoyed those events. And obviously, that’s not sort of a content expertise, but I think navigating academia or industry as a women’s scientist, I think is really worth a thought. And I’m really glad that Alzheimer’s station leadership, Dr. Heather Snyder, Dr. Murray [inaudible 00:19:57], they’re very passionate about this topic and I’m glad to see several events dedicated to that.

Dr Sarah Bauermeister:

Yes. So I think it’s very welcome to see that. And I think anyone missed some of those sessions. It’s very worth looking online to catch up on those. So Claire, tell us about any highlights, which struck you over the conference.

Dr Claire Lancaster:

So I went to a talk yesterday by our [inaudible 00:20:24] from the University of Oxford on the early results from the ILiAD trial. So this was a trial looking at the effect of Levetiracetam, which is an antiepileptic drug on cognition in people with Alzheimer’s disease. And it was super, super interesting to hear more about kind of the speaker’s thoughts on the connection between Alzheimer’s and epilepsy. I think it’s a huge area for kind of future research and has a lot of potential for new treatments. And obviously, the trial was hit really badly by COVID. So they only ended up recruiting about nine people. But even with these nine people, they could say, there was very few side effects of the drug. So it was really well tolerated and there was a small non-significant, but they only had about nine people effect of the drug and cognition.

Dr Sarah Bauermeister:

That’s really positive.

Dr Claire Lancaster:

The other thing which absolutely blew my mind was the homelessness talk by Margo [inaudible 00:21:34]. Yeah. I just never thought about it before. And I see always has these plenaries, which I’ve just blown my mind because I’ve just never considered it before.

Dr Sarah Bauermeister:

Yeah. So I think across all of you, you’ve all mentioned the homelessness talk. And I think there’s definitely, I don’t know if you all agree, there’s more awareness now of people who are sidelined from mainstream research, such as their LGBTQ populations, such as the homelessness population. And I think it’s really refreshing to come to such a large international conference to see these issues, women in science as well, being addressed as key talks. So I’m really encouraged that these are starting to headline research. So before I wrap up, is there anyone else who would like to say anything about something which has really stood out this conference or actually, whether you’ve… Something you’ve really enjoyed, whether it was in the conference or outside of the conference. Baseball game, did anyone go to a baseball game?

Dr Claire Lancaster:

Did I go to a baseline game? AIC [inaudible 00:22:56] some very good parties. I’ve enjoyed the dancers with flashing lights. They’ve been good.

Dr Sarah Bauermeister:

I think that’s great. I think it’s all part of the conference experience that we can at least let our hair down and enjoy ourselves a little bit.

Dr Darina Petrovsky:

Yeah. There’ve been a couple of breakfast events organized by different peers. And I know I’ve heard really great things about the student and the postdoc luncheon experiences of any of you attended that, I have not. But I heard really, there was great attendance and I’ve just been trying to attend sessions this time around that are really outside of my conference zone. So for example, in yesterday’s session, I think that was intentional of the planning committee to pair up, the homelessness talk with the second talk, talked about the different genes in autosomal dominant. I don’t think I would’ve listened to the talk otherwise, but that is something that kind of, and I tried my best sort of to follow it and understand that the person who presented, he’s really well known in that part of the world and he’s done amazing things. And then I’ve been involved in some conversations that talks about the amyloid and the [inaudible 00:24:16]. And I’m like, “Okay, well, I’m following enough to at least have a very general sense of sort of what’s going on and kind of take it all in”.

Dr Darina Petrovsky:

And I’ve also had a chance to connect with our local chapter of the Alzheimer’s association. So right before leaving to go to this conference, I did a community education event there. And I saw that the executive director of our New Jersey chapter was going to be here as well. And I have never met her in person, even though we’re both live in the same state and well, because since most of the programming has been virtual, so I did connect with her and I feel like, okay, now, going back, I feel like, she knows who I am and I know who she is. And perhaps there would be something new and exciting coming out of it. So I would say those have been the highlights and it’s been amazing to… One other, I’m sorry, session. I do want to bring up was the research perspectives, the conversations with the award winners recipients. I thought that was so excellent. And I wish more of sort of the senior folks have visited the student and in post lounge because the programming has been excellent.

Dr Sarah Bauermeister:

I think that’s very encouraging feedback for AIC to hear this. Esther, any final comments?

Esther Hui:

Yeah. I really enjoyed the eventful women that we both went to yesterday. I think that was probably the highlight of AIC for me. Because they shared a lot of struggles and personal struggles that I could really relate to. And yeah. I think I thought it was very empowering and I’m looking forward to one of the speakers talk actually today on Delirium. So yeah.

Dr Sarah Bauermeister:

Fantastic. So, well I think that’s all we have time for today and what are you all… So Esther’s just mentioned what she’s looking forward to today and what are you all looking forward to in today’s schedule?

Dr Claire Lancaster:

I think there’s a symposium on digital cognitive markers, which I’m quite excited for.

Dr Darina Petrovsky:

Yeah. I saw that. That’s pretty interesting.

Dr Sarah Bauermeister:

Yeah. Okay. So maybe that’s where I head today.

Dr Darina Petrovsky:

And then of course I think the iStart reception I think is tonight. So that’s evening seems very appropriate to kind of end, almost end the conference. So I’m looking, of course, looking forward to that. And also the plenary talk of Dr. Sharon in OE is going to be very exciting.

Dr Sarah Bauermeister:

Okay. Well thank you so much. All three of you. So as ever you can find Twitter links and the bio for today’s guests on the dementia research website @dementiaresearcher.nihr.ac.uk. It’s time to end today’s podcast recording. And I’d like to thank our guests, the outstanding Esther Hui, the awesome Dr. Claire Lancaster and the brilliant Dr. Darina Petrovsky. Thank you very much and goodbye from me and from these wonderful guests.

Voice Over:

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

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