Dementia Researcher Blogs

Adam Smith narrates his blog written for Dementia Researcher.

In this blog, Adam looks back on three days at the 36th Alzheimer Europe Conference in Dublin and asks whether dementia care research keeps finding the same things. He draws on 20 years of attending dementia conferences and a career in healthcare service improvement. His example is Cognitive Stimulation Therapy: NICE has recommended it since 2006, yet it is still unevenly available, evidence that hasn’t reached everyone who could benefit. With research funding under pressure, he makes the case for three things: a clear path to delivery in funded care research, funders taking more ownership of what they pay for, and closer links between researchers and the people who commission and provide care. He also offers five practical steps for early career researchers.

https://www.dementiaresearcher.nihr.ac.uk/blog-do-we-already-know-what-good-care-looks-like/

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Adam Smith was born in the north, a long time ago. He wanted to write books, but ended up working in the NHS and at the Department of Health. He is now Programme Director for Dementia Researcher at University College London. He has led several initiatives to improve dementia research (including this website, Join Dementia Research & ENRICH), while also pursuing his own research interests. In his spare time, he spends most of his time drinking too much coffee and squeezing technology into his house.

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Enjoy listening? We're always looking for new bloggers; drop us a line. http://www.dementiaresearcher.nihr.ac.uk

This podcast is brought to you by University College London in association with the National Institute for Health and Care Research, Alzheimer's Association, Alzheimer's Research UK, Alzheimer's Society and Race Against Dementia, who we thank for their ongoing support.

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Most people who end up leading a research group got there by being good at research. Then the job changes overnight. In Wellcome’s survey, 80% of researchers who managed people said they had the skills to manage a team, but only 48% had ever been trained to do it.

This audio overview walks through our guide, Free Tools and Resources for New Research Leaders. It covers why every group needs its unwritten rules written down, and how a free tool can make your job adverts more inclusive. It explains how the GROW and Situation-Behaviour-Impact models take the heat out of one-to-ones and difficult feedback, and why the authorship conversation belongs at the start of a project.

It also tackles the things nobody tells you. A big grant doesn’t cover the full cost of your research, and that explains a lot about hiring freezes. AI assistants can save you hours, but there are firm lines around participant data and peer review. And as a manager, you will never get everything done, so you need to choose what to neglect on purpose.

It ends with a challenge: run a pre-mortem on your own career before burnout does it for you.

This episode was generated with Google’s NotebookLM from our guide and its sources. It’s a quick way to take in the main ideas on your commute. The full guide has the links, the interactive tools and tips from research leaders.

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Beccy Owen narrates her blog written for Dementia Researcher.

When lockdown arrived in 2020, most of us swapped the office for the kitchen table and a daily walk. For people living with dementia, staying at home could take away far more: the routines, familiar faces and small daily contacts that held the day together. Prompted by experience within her own family, PhD student Beccy asks what that loss may have meant, in everyday life and in the brain, and what it might teach us for the next time normal services stop.

https://www.dementiaresearcher.nihr.ac.uk/blog-covid-19-lockdown-people-living-with-dementia/

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Beccy Owen is a PhD Researcher at the University of Warwick, exploring how tau pathology disrupts neuronal ion channels and brain network activity in Alzheimer’s disease. As part of the Midlands Integrative Biosciences Training Programme, her work uses electrophysiology to better understand the molecular drivers of neurodegeneration. Originally from the Welsh countryside, Beccy’s passion for dementia research was shaped during her postgraduate studies and through personal experience with a family member living with the condition. She will be sharing her journey, insights, and lessons learned throughout her PhD here on the blog.

Find Becky on LinkedIn

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Enjoy listening? We're always looking for new bloggers; drop us a line. http://www.dementiaresearcher.nihr.ac.uk

This podcast is brought to you by University College London in association with the National Institute for Health and Care Research, Alzheimer's Association, Alzheimer's Research UK, Alzheimer's Society and Race Against Dementia, whom we thank for their ongoing support.

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Dr Connor Richardson narrates his blog written for Dementia Researcher.

Stroke survivors often worry more about their memory than about having another stroke. Stroke care, though, has been built around protecting the artery rather than the brain.

In this blog, Connor walks through recent evidence on dementia after stroke. That covers a 20-year Ontario cohort, a new risk calculator that uses routine discharge data, research showing that heart risk before a stroke shapes cognitive decline afterwards, and a Rotterdam Study finding on competing risk of death. He argues that cognition should become a routine part of stroke follow-up.

https://www.dementiaresearcher.nihr.ac.uk/blog-who-gets-dementia-after-a-stroke-what-should-happen-next/

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Dr Connor Richardson is a Neuro-epidemiology Research Associate at The University of Edinburgh. His research focuses on using advanced statistical modelling and machine learning to measure dementia risk. Connor blogs about his research, Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion, and sometimes his Pomapoo’s.

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Enjoy listening? We're always looking for new bloggers; drop us a line. http://www.dementiaresearcher.nihr.ac.uk

This podcast is brought to you by University College London in association with the National Institute for Health and Care Research, Alzheimer's Association, Alzheimer's Research UK, Alzheimer's Society and Race Against Dementia, whom we thank for their ongoing support.

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Heather Wilkinson and Fauzia Knight narrate this blog written for Dementia Researcher.

Researchers from King’s College London and the University of Edinburgh had never worked together when a small seed fund brought them into the same room.

In this guest blog, Professor Heather Wilkinson and Dr Fauzia Knight describe how two teams with different strengths, workforce research in London and co-production and arts-based methods in Edinburgh, built a collaboration around the emotional side of dementia care. Their work took in an ekphrastic poetry workshop with more than 150 NHS staff, carers and people living with dementia, a gallery visit that sparked a new exhibition, and three new themes for future grant applications. It is an honest account of what looking beyond familiar networks takes, and what it can open up.

https://www.dementiaresearcher.nihr.ac.uk/blog-interdisciplinary-collaboration-dementia-research/

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Professor Heather Wilkinson recently retired as Professor of Dementia Participation and Practice and Director of the Edinburgh Centre for Research on the Experience of Dementia (ECRED) at the University of Edinburgh, and was part of the leadership team of the Advanced Care Research Centre. Since 1998 her work has centred on increasing the involvement of people living with dementia in research, with a focus on co-production, inclusion and quality of life, including for people with learning disabilities and dementia. She remains actively involved in developing creative methods for including people living with dementia in research and policy.

Dr Fauzia Knight is a Research Fellow at the NIHR Health and Social Care Workforce Research Unit, in the Policy Institute at King's College London. She uses co-creation and creative methods to understand and improve support for people living with dementia, with a focus on care workforce wellbeing, self-management for people with mild dementia, and the support needs of family members, including those caring from a distance.

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Dr Becky Carlyle narrates her blog written for Dementia Researcher.

Becky has taken on co-leadership of her department’s new People & Culture Committee at a time when there is very little money to spend. In this blog she describes how a department can improve the experience of working there without a large budget.

She starts with what staff and students said in their annual survey, especially about how unclear decisions on funding, promotion and space can be. She explains how a regular “You said, We did, It improved” update can rebuild trust and why evaluating culture work matters. She also covers how standing working groups and short Task and Finish groups can deal with bigger problems. Finally, she looks at when clear and flexible policy helps, and when the better answer is to remove a rule rather than add one.

https://www.dementiaresearcher.nihr.ac.uk/blog-research-culture-in-a-low-resource-environment/

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Dr Becky Carlyle is an Alzheimer's Research UK Senior Research Fellow at the University of Oxford and has previously worked in the USA. Becky writes about her experiences of starting up a research lab and progressing into a more senior research role. Becky's research uses mass spectrometry to quantify thousands of proteins in the brains and biofluids of people with dementia. Her lab is working on various projects, including work to compare brain tissue from people with dementia from Alzheimer’s Disease to tissue from people who have similar levels of Alzheimer’s Disease pathology but no memory problems. Becky is also a mum; she runs, drinks herbal teas and reads lots of books.

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Enjoy listening? We're always looking for new bloggers; drop us a line. http://www.dementiaresearcher.nihr.ac.uk

This podcast is brought to you by University College London in association with the National Institute for Health and Care Research, Alzheimer's Association, Alzheimer's Research UK, Alzheimer's Society and Race Against Dementia, whom we thank for their ongoing support.

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Fiona Hartley narrates her blog written for Dementia Researcher.

Fiona Hartley cared for her mum, who had Alzheimer’s disease, and is now a member of Partners in Research, the patient and public involvement group of the NHS Research Scotland Neuroprogressive and Dementia Network.

In this narrated guest blog she reflects on the Celebrating Scottish Research conference in Stirling. Researchers, clinicians and people with lived experience met there on an equal footing. She explains what co-production means in practice, and how her group reviews studies and now runs its own co-research. She also covers the talks that stayed with her, on women and dementia and on why other long-term conditions matter. As a retired physiotherapist and former carer, she brings a practical question to the multimorbidity talk: how do you balance treating one condition against the distress it causes someone living with dementia?

https://www.dementiaresearcher.nihr.ac.uk/blog-celebrating-scottish-research-patient-public-involvement/

Fiona Hartley is a carer and public ambassador with the NRS Neuroprogressive and Dementia Network and a member of its Partners in Research group. A retired physiotherapist who specialised in care of the elderly and neurological conditions, she cared for her mum through Alzheimer's disease and now helps researchers shape studies that reflect what people with dementia and their families really face.

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Dr Yvonne Couch narrates her blog written for Dementia Researcher.

Research culture is a phrase that turns up in every strategy document, but what does it actually mean?

In this narrated bonus blog, Yvonne takes her cue from an organisational psychology podcast. She asks why ideas of culture borrowed from the corporate world sit awkwardly in research, where there is no product and no single “top”. She sets out a framework of purpose, principles and practices, and looks at the trade-offs any culture has to accept. She then asks what happens when principles clash, such as when time spent mentoring isn’t counted as success. Her argument is that culture follows incentives, so the honest test of any research culture is what gets rewarded, promoted and funded.

https://www.dementiaresearcher.nihr.ac.uk/blog-why-research-culture-needs-more-than-good-intentions/

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Dr Yvonne Couch is an Associate Professor of Neuroimmunology at the University of Oxford. Yvonne studies the role of extracellular vesicles and their role in changing the function of the vasculature after stroke, aiming to discover why the prevalence of dementia after stroke is three times higher than the average. Her passion for problem-solving and love of science drive her to advance our knowledge of disease. Yvonne shares her opinions, talks about science and explores different career topics in her monthly blogs - she does a great job of narrating, too.

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Enjoy listening? We're always looking for new bloggers; drop us a line. http://www.dementiaresearcher.nihr.ac.uk

This podcast is brought to you by University College London in association with the National Institute for Health and Care Research, Alzheimer's Association, Alzheimer's Research UK, Alzheimer's Society and Race Against Dementia, whom we thank for their ongoing support.

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Lesley Cousland narrates her blog written for Dementia Researcher.

When eight research requests landed on care homes at around the same time, the team at ENRICH Scotland stopped to take stock. Each study made sense on its own, so what did they add up to for a busy home?

In this blog Lesley looks at that question from three sides: the researcher chasing a recruitment target, the organisation passing requests along, and the care home deciding whether it has room to say yes. She considers what makes taking part worthwhile for a home, why “not now” deserves respect as an answer, and what researchers owe the people who gave their time once the study is over.

https://www.dementiaresearcher.nihr.ac.uk/blog-care-home-research-getting-the-balance-right/

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Lesley Cousland is a Clinical Studies Officer with the Neuroprogressive and Dementia Network and ENRICH Scotland. A retired mental health nurse with over 40 years’ experience, she now supports research in care homes, ensuring residents and staff help shape studies that matter to them.

Neuroprogressive and Dementia Network on LinkedIn

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Rahul Sidhu & Prisha Sharma narrate this blog written for Dementia Researcher.

What changes when you stop studying neurological disease through experiments and start seeing what it does to people’s lives? Two researchers who started in the same place and ended up on different paths put that question to each other. One is still at the bench, working on preclinical models. The other moved through research into patient‑facing work with people living with brain injury and dementia. They talk about what surprised them, where the lab and clinic meet more than you’d expect, and what anyone torn between the two should think about before choosing.

https://www.dementiaresearcher.nihr.ac.uk/blog-from-research-to-clinical-two-perspectives/

Authors:

Prisha Sharma is an Assistant Psychologist at Brainkind, working in a neurobehavioural service that supports people with acquired and traumatic brain injuries. She studied Neuroscience at the University of Manchester and Applied Neuropsychology at the University of Bristol, and hopes to train on the Doctorate in Clinical Psychology and qualify as a Clinical Neuropsychologist.

Rahul Sidhu is a PhD student at The University of Sheffield, focusing on the effects of heart disease on dementia in preclinical models of Alzheimer's disease. His research aims to uncover how cardiovascular health influences neurodegenerative conditions, potentially leading to novel therapeutic strategies.

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