First time at Alzheimer Europe Conference! 🤩

The conference started with welcoming words under the overarching motto: “Nothing for us without us”.  

This principle was highlighted by many speakers. For example, one of the sessions began with a beautiful quotation,

 “Listen to us when we say, “It’s not good enough”. Because it affects all of us, and it includes you”.

This quote came from research led by Alzheimer Scotland about ensuring meaningful engagement with those with the lived experience of dementia in the development of national-level strategies.

As a healthcare researcher who used to work in other domains and only recently joined Alzheimer Centrum Limburg, it’s inspiring to see how strong the engagement of people with lived experience in dementia is at various levels, be it interior design, policy-making, developing services and interventions, etc.

Many inspiring presentations also followed during the second and third days. One example: Gianna Kohl and Georgina Charlesworth from UCL shared their research findings on stigma resilience. The topic of stigma is not new in the field of dementia, but little attention has been devoted to understanding the resilience to stigma. How do some resist stigma while others suffer from its effects in the context of dementia? These questions, as well as many others, were explored during #33AEC - inspiring early-stage researchers for their future steps.