People with dementia “May make the science of dementia better” says leading dementia expert

Dr Kenneth Rockwood, a leading Canadian geriatrician, says that one of the most powerful tools in the management of dementia is being overlooked by scientists and researchers: people who are living with dementia themselves.

Dr Rockwood is in Australia for Dementia Awareness Month as the guest of Alzheimer’s Australia, the national peak body for people with dementia and their carers, to talk about the challenges that the dementia epidemic is bringing in treating people with dementia.

Dr Rockwood says that while dementia research has made great progress in the last 20 years, there is a long way to go in having the evaluative tools that assist clinicians in assessing the value of different treatments.

In his own research, Dr Rockwood has found that people with dementia were often well placed to evaluate the impact of treatment on their own health and wellbeing.

As a result he suggests that people with dementia should be listened to more widely by clinicians and that their personal experience should be considered when evaluating new dementia treatments.

“Making judgements about the benefits of treatments for individual patients on the basis of, say, a four-point change on a given scale is wrong for clinical decision-making,” argues Dr Rockwood. “Our latest research shows that while batteries of neuro-psychological tests assist in classifying groups of people they do not translate to whether a given treatment is helping a given individual.

“A person’s own insight and experience may well help to improve the level of care and medical treatment that we can offer to people with dementia.”