A Comprehensive Look at Dementia with Kevin Jameson, Founder of The Dementia Society of America

If I go biking or I go doing something that I should always wear a helmet or wearing here, protection, eye protection, all of the sensory inputs, ears, eyes, your mouth, those are all things that feed sensory stimulation into your brain. So when you can improve those things, or at least protect those things, then you're going to potentially anyway, there's never a guarantee have a better cognitive health and a better outcome for things in life.

Hello, and welcome to dementia discussions, the podcast for and about caregivers. If you'd like to share your caregiving story with me, I'd love to hear it. Please call me at 310-362-8232 or email me at dementia discussions.net. Today, I'm thrilled to have Kevin Jameson. Kevin is the founder and CEO. He's also a volunteer at the Dementia Society of America. You can flesh out your introduction, Kevin, because it sounds like you hold many titles at the Dementia Society of America. Great.

First of all, thank you very much. It's a pleasure to be here, Barbara, I love the fact that you're focusing on caregivers, I think that's a big part of our focus as well. It's not the only focus, we focus on people living with dementia, and their care partners. But I think care partners have a particular set of needs that are different from the person who's living with dementia necessarily. And I think that's okay. And when we tried to serve both populations, of course, they're kind of one in the same because they're helping each other in many ways. And sometimes the burden shifts more to the care partner and they become a caregiver. But yet roles can shift. And so when you're dealing with a parent, your role shifts as a child. And it's more reversing some of that relationship. But in any event, at the end of the day, people need a lot of help, they need to understand things. And that's what we're here to do. And my role is, I'm really the kind of the chief volunteer and have run the organization without a paycheck for over 10 years. And it's just because I really believe that what we're doing is valuable, and that I was able to do it, and I wanted to do it. And I wanted to create an organization that spoke plainly and simply but accurately with others about dementia, what it is and what it isn't, and how to best deal with it when it presents itself. And it looks like you all you have done that. You clearly have done that because I've been on the website, and you've succeeded in your mission, because it is very clear and down to earth, easy to use and easy to understand. So yeah, in some that Yes. And people come to our website, we have 10s of 1000s of people coming every month. And they come to us in a variety of ways, from a variety of sources. But I think most people are coming to us for that initial understanding about dementia. We're not necessarily a medical organization, we don't wear the white coats and have the stethoscopes necessarily, although we do have medical professionals that are on our advisory council, and to assist us. But you know where we are, we're an education and awareness organization at our heart. And so we want the information to be accessible. And we don't want people to have to jump through a lot of hoops in order to get it. And we're not immediately giving them a pop up on their web page, asking for a donation. We've never done that we never will do that. Because we want to lead first with the awareness, the education and the resources. And if we do a good job, and people appreciate that, then we hope that we'll be financially rewarded as an outcome of that as well. So

I jumped ahead a little bit. I'm sure you have a personal story that got you here. Would you mind sharing that with us?

Yeah, no, absolutely. Really does harken back to the early 2000s. When my wife and I were having, I would call it marital difficulties. And we really didn't know what was going on. She was getting very kind of caustic. Normally. Jenny, my wife was very bubbly and vivacious and just a great big grin and smile all the time. But things had changed and I couldn't figure out what was going on. So we actually went to see a marriage counselor, and I asked her, let's do it and she agreed. And we saw the marriage counselor. In fact the marriage counselors office is only a block away from where I am today. We met with her for some time and at one point If the marriage counselor pulled me aside and said, Kevin, I think Jenny and you love each other. But there's something I can't put my finger on about Jenny, there's something going on. And so she really didn't know. And I didn't know. And certainly Jenny was not self aware of anything. And I worked a lot. I was traveling the world for the sales and marketing position that I had with my company, Honeywell, so I wasn't full time here. I was out on the road a lot. So I didn't see everything that was going on. But one night, we went out to dinner, and an Indian restaurant that we've been to before. And I remember the hostess because she had an unusual name. And when we went walked in there one night, I said hello to the woman by name. And we sat down and Jenny said, How do you know that woman? I said, Oh, I remember her from last time. She had an unusual name. I just remembered it. And Jenny said, I've never been here before. What are you talking about? And I said, Well, wait a minute. What are you talking about? And of course, we were here before we were like a month ago, in fact, and I can tell you where we sat what we ate. And eventually it led to me pulling out credit card receipts. But at the at the dinner, Jenny said you must have been here with another woman. And I'm like, wow. And so timeout, I was just like, we gotta take a pause here, there's something majorly wrong in that she doesn't remember that being a month ago. And she's generally pretty good with memory. But she was a little older than me. But that that wasn't the issue. In the end, I don't think so. Well, she was actually significantly older than me. But at the end, at her age was just part of the pieces of the puzzle. I didn't really know what to do. But I started to ask others, her doctor who we shared a doctor, and other people that I knew that had a lot of experience with health care, because I really, I haven't taken a prescription more than a few weeks in my life. So I'm not really medically oriented myself, personally, I don't go to a lot of doctors don't need to. But I needed to in this case, and they needed to talk to people. So I did not necessarily in front of Ginni, because she wasn't self aware. But I talked with people to try to figure out what was going on. And even neighbors at one point and neighbor came up to me and said, Kevin, the other night, I was speaking with Ginni and she was speaking total gibberish to me. I couldn't understand what she was saying. I kind of agreed with her, but I really didn't know what she was saying to me. And that was like another red flag. And so eventually, all of this led me to push the primary care physician that we had to get Ginni in for a cognitive screening. And Ginny, ultimately agreed to that. But because I think maybe deep down somewhere in the recesses of her mind, she knew she was not connecting certain knots, and she was frustrated and anxious about it. But I don't know, do you never really verbalize that. Even with that, the doctor at the time said, well, she's older and these, this is normal. And she's not that bad. And it took me months to get the physician, our primary care physician to take it seriously. And once they did, and in order to do that, by the way, I should say, Barbara, I had to write down I ended up writing down all the unusual things that happened with Jim, from from outbursts, to paranoia, to aggravation to memory, loss to gibberish, statements to any number of things. And it was like 3040 things over the course of months. And I brought it to the physician said, forget about it, man. You gotta we gotta get ahead of this. And it was only then that we really were taken seriously. And he first sent Ginny to psychiatrist for anti anxiety meds and depression meds and things and that, that wasn't really the answer. It didn't really change much. And then we went to a local neurologist. And the local neurologists have stymied he saw something but no, no. And he wasn't. He's a good guy. But you know, at the end of the day, he wasn't part of a center of excellence for dementia care. I basically said, Well, where do we go next. And we ended up at a university setting not far from our house in Philadelphia, where they had a center of excellence for cognition in neurology, and we got an appointment went down there. And over the course of maybe almost a year, the way the testing is done, they do a neuro Psych Exam. And this is back in the mid 2000s. So not all of the advanced testing was available to lay people at that time. So really, the only things were clinical presentation, neuro psych exams, but they didn't have the brain imaging. They didn't have have the advanced blood tests and spinal taps that they can do. They might have been available to clinical trial people, but they weren't necessarily available to the public. And suffice it to say, after a while we were able to get a dementia diagnosis unspecified is because again, in the mid 2000s, a lot of people were claiming everything's Alzheimer's, but that was starting to change. And so doctors were starting to say unspecified because they didn't want to put all their eggs in the Alzheimer's basket, because the science was showing that things were afoot, and changes in diagnostic workup. And so we ended up leaving that doctor's appointment, great doctor, he ended up serving with us as a board member, when we started the dementia society. And Ginny turned to me and said, where do we go for lunch? And this, and that, to me, gets me a little emotional. That to me, gets me informed, right then in there that Ginny was interested in looking forward and not looking backwards. And that even if she had a cognitive impairment, and even if she heard the words dementia, or dementia, or anything similar to that, she was like, let's keep moving. And it really changed the dynamics of our relationship. And we went around the world. I immediately booked a trip to China and walked on the Great Wall. We went to the terracotta soldiers and she had we then went to India, we went on the Ganges on the great sites, the Taj Mahal. We went to Egypt, we went into the pyramids, we floated down the Nile. We went to Italy, we went to France, we went to England, we went to Liverpool and did the Beatles experience went to Ireland. We went to Sweden, we went a lot of places. And because I wanted Ginni to, first of all, I love to travel and Ginny loved to travel. And I knew that she would enjoy it. And that she get a lot out of it. And it was we didn't know how much time she would have. And so we just started doing that. And I'm so glad that we did. Yeah,

you did the right thing you seize the day, the only thing they really know for sure is that she would decline over time.

Exactly.

Yeah, that is an emotional story. You are right,

We made our way forward. And I started to bring in home care for her almost as companion care, because I was still traveling extensively, and couldn't be at home all the time. So I had somebody come in as a home care aide, just to keep the house clean, maybe make a meal with her companion to her. And she was somewhat open to it with somebody about her age. And so it was kind of like a girlfriend type situation in the beginning. And then it transitioned over time to more, getting her ready for bed, getting meals prepared, taking her places when she couldn't drive any longer. And then we had eventually somebody living in the house. So we created an apartment for somebody to live and take care of the day to day. And then that wasn't even safe enough for her because you're 10 feet away. And she's still, in our case, you fell on the stairs. And even though I was there, and the character person was there, and I had to rush her to the hospital. I just said at that point, well, this is not safe. So we made the decision, and very luckily, had great friends who helped us but got Jenny into a an excellent dementia care community, local to us. And that was a saving grace was really hard for me to leave her there that first time. I went back with flowers and left them at the door. Just because they didn't want me to see her. But at the end of the day, I'm sorry, I get very emotional with some of these.

Sorry, there's room for tears. That's very sweet. So this is a very,

what it ended up being one of the best experiences possible because I was able to become even though she started to lose my identity, that I wasn't her husband. She knew that I loved her. And she knew that I cared about her. And therefore when I came to see her, it was a relatively good experience for both of us. And she ended up making friends and having good times and making meals with people and we would come in I would take her outside I would. Eventually she stopped being able to raise her arms and hands to feed herself. So I oftentimes would feed her and we'd go outside and we experienced the fresh air when she eventually was in a wheelchair. But she passed away. She went into hospice and I retired from my career. I was in the security business electronic security business for many years. And I retired because I could, I was 55. And I took a lump sum and said, I'm out of here and basically devoted myself to her care. on hospice. She she lived another year. And then in that process, started the dementia society. So that's kind of when it started in 2003, is when we actually formed the organization. It was a natural thing for me to include some of the people that had been key to our her care. Her neurologist, her care manager, her attorney, her all those people came together, as my first board knew I had known Jenny for years. So it was really special. And in fact, we had a kickoff dinner called Dance against dementia in 2003, almost 10 years ago to the day was September, but that we did it. And we raised $8,000. Wow. We went 100 people, and we could see her room at the care community from the hotel, where we held the event. And she was to conjoin. US, but she was there. And we could we knew she was. And so it was very special. And ever since that kickoff, talking a little bit about the dementia society. But, you know, I realized that people living with dementia, people experiencing changes in their loved one have almost nowhere to go the or they think they don't, certainly 10 years ago, it was more limited. But everybody thought everything was Alzheimer's, everything. It's all doom and gloom. There's no light at the end of the tunnel. There's no hope. It's over, pack it up, go live in a nursing home, your life is over. And I knew that to be different. And I knew that I could share that different message with people. And the accuracy with which we would describe dementia has was very helpful to people. Because now people with Lewy Body, people with frontotemporal people with vascular and PAH normal pressure hydrocephalus, people with CTE, the chronic traumatic encephalopathy, people with Alzheimer's, a young onset and older onset, they're all different, and they're not necessarily related. But they all create dementia, which is a syndrome and not a disease. And when we talk about that with people, that dementia is not a disease, their eyes light up, like what are you talking? The government calls it a disease like doctor calls it as the care community calls it a disease. My homecare agency calls it a disease, all we want to cure dementia, and like it's a singular disease, right. And it's not more of an umbrella. It's an umbrella, it's completely an umbrella. It's a collection of symptoms, and that collection of symptoms, which are degenerative over time, right? The cognitive impairments do progress over time and get worse in a dementia and are fatal. In the end. That's a syndrome. And just to get a little more precise about it, Alzheimer's disease, which is a significant form of dementia, not to downplay that, but it's actually going down relative to the total number of people with dementia today. But that's the exact opposite that the public thinks the public is being fed information like, oh, my gosh, Alzheimer's is growing out of bounds. It's outstripping everything. No, the science is such that the studies are now showing that because of the more precise diagnoses and other factors, such as changes in lifestyle, there's less smoking, there's less lung disease, there's less things that are risk factors for Alzheimer's specifically, than the actual numbers. So the percentage of people with dementia that has Alzheimer's dementia is actually going down and that the projections that are talked about by very large organizations, right, when we know who they are, those very large organizations in the fine print, put that information in their materials, but at the headline level, they haven't changed it. And so when they say 6.56 point 7 million people living with Alzheimer's disease, that's an incorrect statement, and they say so in the details, but they don't say it as a headline. And that's, it's gonna change and it takes time for that messaging to change and I know it will, and I don't think they mean any harm by it. But I think that the at the end of the day, it does a does a disservice As to all the other dimensions that also exist Lewy Body and frontotemporal and all the others, vascular in particular.

It does seem like there's a focus on vascular dementia or maybe the mixed mixed picture. Vascular dementia and Alzheimer's, there's a big focus on lifestyle changes, like you just alluded to, which thinks we can do something about

all of us. Absolutely. We have a thing that called that we call it the cognitive action plan 10 building blocks to better brain health. And it's so we have these two programs, right. One is the dementia action plan, seven steps to take in the face of dementia. And the other is the cognitive action plan 10 building blocks to better brain health. And the 10 building blocks to better brain health are really focused on modifiable risk factors is what they call it, the big studies that have come out recently from around the world. And the meta studies of studies have looked at this and said, Wow, there are these things that we can actually change in our life that will potentially modify our risks, lower our risks, or raise them or not only an Alzheimer's dementia, but uh, vascular dementia and others. And some of the dimensions are driven by in part genetics. But the vast majority are driven by what is now believed to be modifiable risk factors.

Yeah, and those are things like diet is really to break it down simply right? Diet,

exercise, simulation of your brain. So cognitive stimulation, new and novel things, right, which is part of the stimulation process, mindfulness, socialization, even just protecting your head. So if you think about it, brain bleeds spinal fluid buildup, which is called normal pressure hydrocephalus. These can come about through being too sedentary, or having a head injury, a TBI, traumatic brain injury, you can create neuro inflammation, which starts to wreak havoc across the brain. There's all sorts of things now that they identify that are risk factors. And you know, instead of reaching high up to pull the Wheaties box, off the top shelf in the grocery store where you might topple back, or changing lightbulbs in the kitchen, when you have to get up on a stepladder, and you're 76 years old sounds some people can do that. That's great. But taking the step to say, Well, wait a minute, maybe I need to help with a neighbor. Or maybe I can ask a passerby in the grocery store to get that, that thing off the top shelf for me, instead of me trying to do it myself. Or if I go biking, or I go doing something that I should always wear a helmet or wearing here, protection, eye protection, all of the sensory inputs, ears, eyes, your mouth, those are all things that feed sensory stimulation into your brain. So when you can improve those things, or at least protect those things, then you're going to potentially anyway, there's never a guarantee, have a better cognitive health and a better outcome for things in life. Yeah, they are breaking it down to just simple things you can do in life. That will make lasting changes, keeping your blood pressure in control, eating the more balanced diet, more fruits and vegetables with all the edge. Antioxidants, right? Because we have neuro inflammation and the toxins are in our bodies. If people know this, they talked about it. But what do they do about it? One of the things that I commit myself to many times a week is to get out and walk first thing in the morning I just did today I walked probably four miles. And I do it early. And I haven't come back and have a nice cup of black coffee, and maybe some oatmeal, and some fruit and some nuts. And that's my breakfast as an example. But it takes forethought. And

they say you actually don't need to walk for miles. If you just walk 10 minutes a

day, do something

that changes and improves your health right there. And then very slowly, yeah,

if you go to the store and you drive there, instead of parking near the store, Park as far away as you can. Don't be afraid of the rain. And just movement in general lubricates everything, including the brain, you get the spinal fluid lubricating, you get the blood flowing, everything starts moving, the joints are in better shape. So a sedentary lifestyle is a big risk factor for people.

Yeah, that's what they say. sitting is the new smoking. That's Oh, absolutely, absolutely. Thank you for telling your story. I know that was a hard story to talk about your the love of your life and sounds like so. I appreciate that. And it's usually stories like that that get us into right the work that we do. Oh absolutely. Yeah. I have some sort of personal stories. So getting back to the dementia society, it sounds like you had a long hard road to diagnosis. And you're trying really to help people and hope that they don't have that similar experience that they can learn, like I was looking on the website, and there are warning signs of dementia. And I'm sure people don't have to have a list of 40 things that have gone kind of amiss. And your spouse doesn't have to be accusing you of infidelity, or whatever it is, in order to go to the doctor and get a closer look at what's happening in their brain. That's

true. So I think what ends up happening Barber is we live our lives and we expect normalcy, whatever that is, right? Whatever we've experienced previously, we expected for the future to and that we call normalcy in our lives. And when abnormal things happen, things that maybe look and seem on the outside to be, we don't, it's kind of like the frog being boiled in hot water. If you put a frog directly into a boiling pot of water, that frog is not going to sit there. But if you put the frog in the water and turn the heat up slowly, some people call it gaslighting the frog, but at the end of the day, you're you're changing things slowly, and then oftentimes is what happened. Never, it's rare for you to have like a lightning bolt moment, I had one. But that was only after a lot of like, minor changes that occurred, mainly personality and things like that. And some verbal skills, you can almost say, Oh, she must have been tired, or Oh, she never really got along with that person anyway, or there's any number of things, you justify it. But you wait for the precipitating event, the thing that says that's it, that's it stop timeout, this is a major break from normalcy. And that is oftentimes what has to happen for people to get the help they need for a car accident, or running with a neighbor where they're totally not their normal self in their conversation, getting lost and not being able to find their way back. In a lot of cases, the person who is living with the dementia or the cognitive impairment, because it's not always dementia, but it could be a minor cognitive impairment, they may or may not be self aware. If they're self aware, then they may say, You know what I want to get checked out because they're frustrated, they're anxious, they get angry, and then they go why? Well, I'm not able to retrieve words as quickly, I'm not able to find my way back to my house as quickly, something's going on. But that the number of people who are that self aware is a minority. Yeah. And some dementia is in and of themselves, the changes in the pathology of the brain are such that you are not self aware. The physical changes to the hippocampus, as an example, directly affects short term memory. That's the new understanding about Alzheimer's in particular, is that it's mainly starch, predominantly some there are different subtypes of Alzheimer's, by the way, but one of the subtypes The primary subtype of Alzheimer's, it's said to start and show up in changes to the hippocampus, and that we now understand to be the gateway of short term to long term memory. So when that becomes a fact, affected, you get a lot of repetition, you get short term memory loss about what did somebody say, what you had for breakfast? These are things that become early warning signs. But I will just simply say that to get somebody into a doctor for a workup is no easy task. If they're not self aware, absolutely. And you're right, most people are not self aware, it's not the usual case, it's the unusual person who says my missing meetings at work, I really need to figure out what's going on. And so when you have a younger onset, so somebody under 65, that's what we would always consider younger onset of anything, those people might be working still. And the changes in somebody's cognition may be more evident. If somebody is not working anymore, and they're at home, and they're socially isolated, that changes may be less self evident, and only evident when family comes to visit or only evident when they talk with a neighbor. And so they're all these things. But if you're staying socially active and you're in the workforce, having a cognitive challenge, by the way, you should know that most of the types of dementia that show up in pre 65 Right, so that younger onset are driven mostly by genetics. So younger onset Alzheimer's, Lewy Body, frontotemporal CTE is not necessarily genetic, but it shows up at a younger age oftentimes, but some of these are very much driven by and not on 100% of the cases certainly, but in a significant portion of the cases, that they're driven by and informed by your genetics, and they can do genetic testing. Now. FTD is a great example. And we do have a sponsorship, just to be clear with passage bio, which is a biotech involved in FTD research. But what they're doing is they're offering free genetic testing to families of those who have been diagnosed with FTD. And there are certain types of FTD that are driven more by genetics than other types. families that want to know, Well, Dad had FTD, at 55, which would be common, generally younger men, right? In their younger, let's say, 50s. So dad had FTD, we know that all the signs were there was do I have their childhood, there are the biotechs, including the one I mentioned, but there are many biotechs, that are offering this test lead up to a clinical trial for those families. It's important clinical trials match the need of the clinical trial. And that's one of the reasons why was being overstated by 3030. Is because people were coming into Alzheimer's trials, but they had not had the biomarker information to prove they had Alzheimer's disease, that now with these biomarkers that you can get either through blood or through brain imaging. And you can determine whether somebody meets the criteria. disease that is now doable. But it wasn't widely 20 years ago, or 30 years ago. So people were clinical diagnosis, that is how they presented doctor's office and the history like oh, he forgets a lot of things. Or he gets upset easily. Well, that clinical information was made into a diagnosis. And they would say, Oh, well, this person has Alzheimer's disease. But when today, 2030 years later, they can take that same person, scan their brain, do blood tests, genetic tests, and determined that no, in fact, that person does not match the criteria for Alzheimer's, so the person doesn't have it. And if you think about it, 30 years ago, 20 years ago, 10 years ago, we were putting people into clinical trials for Alzheimer's disease that didn't actually have Alzheimer's disease. So if you do that, what do you think the results of the drug tests are going to be? They're going to fail, right? Because people aren't being cured or modify audibly treated, their outcomes are not necessarily changing because the drug is intending to change something that's not there. So that sort of kind of is the big picture of what's been going on over the last 10 years.

Yeah, it does seem like drug trials have gotten clinical trials have gotten much more targeted. If you have amyloid plaque, you can be in the trial, or looking at specific level

of amyloid. You know, I think our brains in general, we all have some level of, of beta amyloid, because it's part of kind of the response to neuro inflammation and a number of other things that are going on in our brains. But is it in abundance to the point where it's meeting the threshold for the classic diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease, and you need several things to be occurring, including tau protein and things like that appearing in neurofibrillary tangles. But these things are starting to be imaged. They're starting to be tested in our spinal fluid and our blood in our eyes, and so forth. I just want to get back to your mission of for the dementia Society of America, and let's just talk about the great programs you have going in, in your organization. You got it. So our mission has not really changed that much from day one. We have kind of three mission points, awareness and education. Then the second is life enrichment. And that takes a few forms of programs and in recognition, and that takes a few forms. And recognition runs the gamut from giving a certificate to a caregiver who's been especially wonderful with your mom, dad, husband, wife, sister, brother, and you want to give them some special recognition. We have an annual recognition program where they come on and they get the certificate At that celebration. We also fund research through recognizing researchers that are doing good work, we actually seed fund their their research. So a lot of researchers to get an NIH grant or some other major grant need to prove or at least prove the hypothesis as possible, what they're thinking. And so we fund that work. We fund the work that helps them get the bigger grant if we put in 50 $100,000 into something, they may turn around and get a million dollars from the NIH. So we believe in doing that, and giving a start, we also have scholarships. So we have a lot in the recognition space. In the life enrichment space. It's all about non medical therapies, art, music, movement, creating a documentary about a life, any of these things are kind of life enrichment. We also have something called Operation keepsafe, which is life enrichment. It's an ID program for people living with dementia. And we provide them a free ID kit. So that if somebody becomes lost, disoriented, can't make their way back, that hopefully somebody a Good Samaritan or other will be able to identify them through the bracelet, they call a toll free number, and they can get the person's identity and, and help get them back to safety. So we offer that free of charge, anyone in the country that has a need like that, because Around 68,000 people a year are lost for ever, in this country to elopement and critical wandering. And so people leave their homes, they're going to work, you know, even in the middle of the night, or they're going to school or going back to family dinner and their, their mother and father have long paths. But they want to go back to home, they want to go back to childhood home. And they become disoriented, they become lost, they could go into, you know, a pond into traffic, bad things can happen. We believe we've looked at the numbers around 60 to 70,000 people every year, are lost forever. They're never found or they're found not alive. So it's a big number. And we're trying to make a dent in that. And then the awareness education pieces, our biggest piece, and that is people come to us. We have a weekly Ask the Expert zoom call, so people can come online. I think you interviewed Tammy, Anastasia, she runs it today.

I did. She's terrific. I encourage everyone to get on to your ask the expert because she's wonderful. She really

is she is we try to today's zoom world where everything is done virtual. Not everybody can go to a physical support group. But you can be in Des Moines, Iowa, you can be in Tallahassee, Florida, or Santa Barbara, California, and beyond the call and ask questions. It's not really we're not looking at providing therapy for people. But what we're providing is a supportive environment where you can ask any question about dementia? And we'll attempt an answer and an accurate answer. But we also have videos, we have interviews, we have blog posts, we have podcasts, I think, like an art program called the artful insights where people can from their homes, look at very famous artwork, or very interesting artwork, and then be guided through a discussion about that artwork with their loved one. And they don't have to sign up for anything. They just go to YouTube or channel and watch it. Yeah,

that's great. Got a different museums around the country. Yeah.

Oh, we did the Charles Schulz Museum. We've done a lot of great museums.

Yeah. And interesting information about Facebook support groups, a dozen Facebook support groups out there. Oh,

yeah. Yeah, in the multi 100,000 followers. In terms of our Facebook community, we definitely provide information there. So at the end of the day, we're really about helping families and individuals facing dementia, and who wants to have better brain health? It's really both groups of people. And I think almost everybody wants better brain health, no matter what stage you're at in life. And so those two things, and all of our funding comes from individual, basically, for the most part, small donors. We don't get government grants. We don't have a major funding institution behind us, individual donors from across the country. Send us support. And we love that. And that's what drives us. That's what keeps us going. Kevin, that's

just great. What a great mission. Great story. Thank you. Thank you for coming on today and sharing this information. Really? Oh, it's

been my pleasure. Yeah,

I really I had never heard of the dementia Society of America. And now that I have, I'm happy to spread the word about you. Well,

we really appreciate that. We're not the biggest, but we definitely try our hardest. It's like the old hurts that we try harder.

And you do well, yes. And you succeed. Remember that you can follow dementia discussions on Apple podcasts, Spotify, Google podcasts, and many more. If you listen on Apple podcasts, it would mean a lot. If you would leave me a review for any other information that on this podcast please visit me at dementia discussions.net. And please share this podcast with someone you know if you think it may help. Thanks again for listening and I'll see you here again next time on dementia discussions.