Amy M. Klingler, MS, PA-C, DFAAPA - Keeping Brain Health Top of Mind: Preserving Cognition and Improving Early Detection and Diagnosis of Alzheimer’s Disease

So our first question, which of the following is the greatest barrier or challenge you experience in your practice when addressing cognitive health? You'll choose one answer.

We know they're all barriers, but we'd like to see what's the most impactful for you.

Limited time during routine visits, uncertainty about which screening tools to use and how to interpret the results.

Just kind of some discomfort in talking about cognitive decline with patients and care partners.

Lack of access kind of feels futile to have the discussion.

But then there's also an all of the above.

Great.

So what we're seeing over half of people note that limited time during routine visits to discuss and assess, modify risk factors for dementia and cognitive concerns is the greatest.

And I think that kind of mimics what we're all seeing in practice.

We have less time to do more.

But there's still a fair number of people who have some uncertainty about the tools, some discomfort and lack of access to specialists.

So we hope to help address some of these issues through our talk today and, you know, give you some tools to try to help your practice and help expedite your evaluations.

So we just wanna introduce a few things about Alzheimer's disease and the importance of advanced practice clinicians in addressing Alzheimer's disease.

So just a reminder that dementia is one of the biggest global health crises of the 21st century.

Alzheimer's accounts for 60 to 80% of dementia cases.

Currently, we have about 7 million Americans living with Alzheimer's disease, and that number is expected to double by 2060.

So this is an opportunity to intervene and make some improvements in your patient care.

So our health system, despite this concern about more Americans living with Alzheimer's disease, we have a shortage of dementia care specialists.

Our infrastructure is underprepared for managing this number of patients, and we continue to have a growing aging population.

So what we're hoping to address today is that feeling that a lot of us have that we're under equipped and to diagnose and manage the complexities of dementia.

So we know that PAs and nurse practitioners have become primary care clinicians in these dementia care models.

And that we are managing our patients across the entire spectrum from initial evaluations and symptom management to research and advanced care planning.

So this gives us an opportunity to intervene and really make a difference in our patients' lives and the lives of their care partners, because as you'll see, that's also quite important.

So today during this workshop, we're going to engage patients in conversations about cognitive health and modifiable risk factors for dementia.

We're going to help identify potential concerns and help facilitate early intervention.