Dr. Karlawish a researcher on the Healthy Brain Research Network and the Cognitive Aging Communication Project, both funded supplements to the UPenn Prevention Research Center. He also serves as the director of the Penn Memory Center. Dr. Karlawish writes about what to look for and the risks involved with allowing the disease to progress without intervention.
Read about the signs to look for and his personal experience with an aging parent here. Tweet about your experiences, using the hashtag #DisruptDementia and tag @AARP and @jasonkarlwish.
In Forbes, PRC Researcher Jason Karlawish, MD, challenges the social stigmatizing of Alzheimer’s in an article titled “Alzheimer’s Disease Patients Aren’t Zombies; They’re People And We Need To Treat Them Like People.” Karlawish said, ” The inspiration came from a class I taught this semester on the public health challenges of Alzheimer’s disease. The students and I discussed the stories of Alice Munro and how they pull the reader in and out of different realities. The lives of the patient and the caregiver aren’t a juxtaposition of the unreal versus the real. They both live in the surreal. The challenge of living with Alzheimer’s disease, whether as patient or caregiver, is to negotiate this “surreality.”
U.S. Surgeon General Vivek H. Murthy and the National Prevention Council release:
Healthy Aging in Action: Advancing the National Prevention Strategy
Healthy Aging in Action (HAIA) identifies recommendations and actions to promote healthy aging and improve health and well-being in later life. HAIA highlights federal and nonfederal policies and programs that reflect the National Prevention Strategy’s approach of targeting prevention and wellness efforts to promote healthy aging to further advance the Strategy for an aging society.
The Healthy Aging in Action aims to:
Support prevention efforts to enable older adults to remain active, independent, and involved in their community;
Highlight innovative and evidence-based programs from National Prevention Council departments and agencies and local communities that address the challenges related to physical, mental, emotional, and social well-being that are often encountered in later life; and
Inform future multisector efforts to promote and facilitate healthy aging in communities.
The National Prevention Council, comprised of 20 Federal agencies and chaired by the Surgeon General, developed the HAIA with input from key stakeholders and the Advisory Group on Prevention, Health Promotion, and Integrative and Public Health.
Writing in Forbes Magazine, UPenn PRC Researcher Jason Karlawish, MD, asks what it means when an Alzheimer’s patient loses the autonomy to live safely in his or her home and turns to adult day care, assisted living, or other types of facilities. “Refugees need asylum, and those exiled from their home by Alzheimer’s disease should be able to find safe harbor in these places,” says Karlawish. “We ought to view moving there not as a failure to care but as part of the story of leaving one home for another.”
Broadening our understanding of Alzheimer’s beyond the medical diagnosis is a next step, according to Karlawish. “Framing Alzheimer’s as a humanitarian crisis ties together the many diverse but interconnected sufferings: the millions of caregivers who struggle to make a typical day for the patients, struggle because their will to care is frustrated by a system ill-equipped to educate them about what to do, where to find care and how to pay for it. It explains how the causes of the Alzheimer’s crisis aren’t simply a biomedical problem in need of better drugs but a social, economic and political problem.”
UPenn PRC researcher and Penn Medicine physician Jason Karlawish was one of the top Penn experts taking part in a day-long series of health research-related presentations for the 50th anniversary gathering of the Penn Class of 1966.
Karlawish addressed the challenges that Alzheimer’s disease presents to science and society. “The other area of research we’re doing, in addition to better ways to diagnose or treat the disease is to figure out better ways to learn how to live with the disease and address some of the emotional, social and cultural challenges we face as we push these diagnoses into increasingly more normal and non-clinically significant stages.”
“To review and discuss the novel ethical challenges that need to be overcome for successful performance of trials in the preclinical stage of AD, a multi-stakeholder group met in a 1-day summit entitled “Ethical challenges of future Alzheimer’s disease clinical research” held in Barcelona in October 2014. This reunion was organized by the Barcelonaβeta Brain Research Center, the research institute where the Pasqual Maragall Foundation conducts all its scientific activities devoted to clinical research for the prevention of AD. This discussion group included experts from academia, including AD researchers and bioethicists, patients’ organizations and regulatory agencies. This article summarizes the outcome of that meeting, where these ethical and policy challenges were debated and recommendations to address them throughout the research process were proposed, discussed, and agreed”
In the November 7, 2015 edition of Forbes magazine, Jason Karlawish, MD, Principal Investigator on the UPenn PRC Cognitive Aging Project and Healthy Brain Research Network, examines the public stigma of neurodegenerative diseases and how Robin Williams’ suicide brings to light how patients and their families deal with the implications of illnesses with progressive decline.
The University of Pennsylvania Prevention Research Center (UPenn PRC) is a community-engaged research center that was founded in 2014. The UPenn PRC’s mission is to improve the health of people in Philadelphia, Southeastern Pennsylvania, and beyond by preventing, reducing, and treating chronic diseases. The center’s primary focus is on implementation of evidence-based strategies to improve patient and provider communication to optimize clinical and community-based management of cancer in diverse older adults.
Dr. Karlawish a researcher on the Healthy Brain Research Network and the Cognitive Aging Communication Project, both funded supplements to the UPenn Prevention Research Center. He also serves as the director of the Penn Memory Center. Dr. Karlawish writes about what to look for and the risks involved with allowing the disease to progress without intervention.
