Dementia Dialogue helped the IMPACT-AD team and participants share their stories through a two-part series of Alzheimer's disease biomarker testing.
Dementia Dialogue is support by the Public Health Agency of Canada and provides people with lived experience a way to share their stories with each other and the broader community. Listeners who have dementia, care partners, and others gain insight and strengthen their adaptive skills. Episodes also help the broader community understand what it means to live with dementia and how they can support people.
Dr. Mari DeMarco is a researcher at the University of British Columbia and Clinical Chemist at St. Paul's Hospital, concerned with how the diagnoses of neurodegenerative diseases can be improved by discovering and using biomarkers. Her research lab aims to create better tools for the timely diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease, frontotemporal degeneration, and related disorders and make these tools easily accessible to those that need them via her work with the clinical laboratory at St. Paul's Hospital. In this episode, Dr. DeMarco talks about the use of the amyloid beta peptide and tau biomarkers in dementia and specifically Alzheimer's disease and the results of the IMPACT-AD study.
In this second episode on biomarkers, Ann Bil, a woman living with dementia, and Kristi Winjsma, her daughter, discuss why they enrolled in the IMPACT-AD study, their experience, and how they used the results from the investigation. Khushbu Patel, a graduate student in the DeMarco lab, talks about overall feedback from participants' and resources available from the study resource page: https://www.impactad.org/resources. Kristi mentions the help provided through First Link, a service of the Alzheimer Society of British Columbia and other Alzheimer Societies in Canada.
For more information on about biomarkers visit Dr. DeMarco's presentation on the topic: https://www.impactad.org/post/2020-alzheimer-update