When Jason Karlawish started working with dementia patients in the late ’90s, there often wasn’t much he could offer them. “I gave them a diagnosis,” he told me on this week’s episode of the “First Opinion Podcast,” but had limited medications to prescribe. Now Karlawish — who is STAT’s Neurotransmissions columnist; a professor of medicine, medical ethics, health policy, and neurology at the University of Pennsylvania; co-director of the Penn Memory Center; and executive producer of the “Age of Aging” podcast — says a revolution is taking place in dementia care, thanks to diagnostics that are removing uncertainty and treatments that actually have some effect.
“For many patients, I can give you a definitive diagnosis,” he said. “And for some patients, I can do that and give you a therapy that slows the progression of disease. … Each patient’s illness experience, I’m noticing, is quite different than the illness experiences that I narrated and wrote about and thought about in the early, late 20th-, early 21st-century.” It is, as he has written about in Neurotransmissions, the “democratization of dementia.” Now, the U.S. medical system has to catch up with these new diagnostics and treatments.
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