Baycrest

Dr. Tiffany Chow Dr. Linda Mah Clinician-Scientist Clinician-Scientist TAKING CARE OF THE CAREGIVERS FACING THE CHALLENGE While awareness of Alzheimer's disease has grown in recent years, one unseen aspect of the disease is the effect it has on the children who are living at home with a family member who has Alzheimer's or frontotemporal dementia. Until recently there have been no written resources to guide children and teens – or even for the well parent to assist their children through the caregiving experience. Dr. Tiffany Chow, a clinical researcher specializing in diagnosing and treating early-onset dementia, is the driving force behind the website When Dementia is in the House. Developed in collaboration with writer Katherine Nichols, the site is designed to help family members learn strategies to manage the emotional conflicts and unpredictable behaviours associated with early-onset dementia in their loved ones – and to find ways, despite the upheaval, to enjoy quality moments of family time. Plans are underway to extend the educational effort to children too young to access the Internet yet and those families living with Alzheimer's disease. Why is it harder to treat people who suffer from depression later in life? Dr. Linda Mah has identified an important clue in the search for the answer. In Dr. Mah's study, researchers found that older adults with depression were less sensitive to the effects of positive or negative facial expressions. That is, when shown photos of different faces, depressed patients were less engaged by happy, sad or fearful faces compared to older adults without depression. Depressed patients also made more errors in labelling neutral faces. The study suggests that it's more than cognitive decline that is behind the challenge of treating older patients with depression – and points to a greater need to focus on emotions in trying to understand the underlying factors of latelife depression. Dr. Mah is currently using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to evaluate emotional processing and brain activity in geriatric patients with depression. The hope is that this knowledge will inform the development of new and better strategies for treating depression in late life.

• Cover