• Question: How does your work affect people and how?

    Asked by anon-188258 to Paul, Nadine, Alex on 16 Nov 2018.
    • Photo: Nadine Mirza

      Nadine Mirza answered on 16 Nov 2018:


      My work does and is hoping to do the following things:
      1) Teach people about ways to prevent dementia that they can incorporate in their lives. Hopefully, by doing this we may slowly be able to create a dent in the number of people who end up with it.
      2) Create tests that allow people from different cultures and languages to get a diagnosis for dementia, because without receiving a diagnosis you can’t access any of the help and support for dementia. These tests are matched according to people’s backgrounds.
      3) Making it easier for people from different backgrounds, especially South Asians, to access the help and support for dementia. I am doing this by identifying what kind of barriers are currently stopping them from accessing help, why they are doing this and what kind of solutions can I develop to stop this. This means, if more people are getting help for dementia then they and their families can be more comforted and helped to manage their lives.
      I hope this answers your question!

    • Photo: Alex Reid

      Alex Reid answered on 16 Nov 2018:


      Hi glitterunicorn158. Sleep is a huge part of the human experience, we each spend roughly 1/3rd of our lives in this state so it is very important to know what it does. It appears to be involved in a huge range of things such as helping us heal faster and grow more. It also does a lot of things to the brain and mind such as memory processing (known as ‘consolidation’) and emotional regulation. Understanding sleep’s role in all of the above means it can have applications to all these areas. In psychology for example there is a very close link between sleep and mental health in disorders such as PTSD and depression. In some cases, such as with Alzheimer’s disease, sleep may be part of what is known as a negative feedback loop. Poor sleep can lead to a worsening of the condition, which leads to even more poor sleep, and so on. The scope and applications of sleep research are both broad and varied and I am proud to be part of it 🙂

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