You’ve had an expansive career in healthcare with a big focus on dementia. Has there been a chapter of your career that you’ve enjoyed the most?
I think the last two or three years have probably been the best in many ways. It’s been the first time that there is a strong sense we’re actually connecting the dots in terms of the science, as well as the clinical care, involved in Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia, which maybe wasn’t always the case, historically.
Your current focus at Scottish Brain Sciences is early detection of brain disease so it can be treated before progressing to dementia. What progress has been made with this so far?
I think the progress probably dates back over the last 10 years or so, with tests like spinal fluid and PET (scan) imaging, which can show pathology before Alzheimer’s symptoms develop. These tests are necessary upstream, for people being able to use therapeutics, because you first need to know people have the condition in question. But I think one of the major advances over the last two or three years has been, not just us gaining a great understanding of those tests, but also in the development of blood tests, which can pick up changes in the brain reasonably accurately.
So, I think the move from recognising that this is a brain disease, or these are a series of brain diseases rather than clinical syndromes, has been, very, very important. If you have to wait for symptoms to develop, you’ll be in quite a late stage of disease, which may not be as amenable to treatment as early in the course of the illnesses.
Maintaining good brain health can help lower our risk of developing dementia. Is there anything you do for your own brain health that you’d recommend to others?
While I don’t have any medical illness that can pose a risk of dementia, I think, in many ways, a lot of the things I do now are in an effort to keep myself physically healthy, so that I reduce my risk of developing conditions such as high cholesterol, high blood pressure, and diabetes, which fall under the modifiable risk factors we can control for better brain health. For me, it’s about exercise, and in many ways, particularly running, is quite calming, quite meditative. So, for all those modifiable risk factors, probably the one I focus almost of all is my physical health.
How can non-pharmacological interventions such as meaningful music contribute to conversation and practice in brain health?
I think one of the things that we recognise is that social connectivity is a really important element for preventing poor brain health. It seems to be that the people who have greater social networks tend to be at a lower risk of developing dementia in the future, and in many ways, music can be a real catalyst for having those social connections. I think that music can be quite a strong glue for holding society together, in many ways. But I think more directly, in people with dementia syndromes, that there’s been compelling observations made that listening to familiar music can have a very calming effect on the individual. For a lot of people, music can have very emotional connections. Listening to music you enjoy, taking you back to periods in your life when you started hearing that music, getting to know that music, is a really powerful memory link. There’s so much that music can do in maintaining brain health across the life course.
I think I’ve got it’s some pretty eclectic tastes in music. There are a few newer songs that just seem to resonate, and then there’s songs that I’ve listened to since I was in my teens, both would be on my list. So, in no particular order…
A Letter to Elise, The Cure
I used to listen to The Cure a lot when I was younger, and recently I was on a work trip to San Diego, and this one came onto the radio. As it turned out, the Uber driver also liked it, so he ended up driving around the harbour a couple of times so we could hear it through to the end of the song
How to Dance in Time, Manchester Orchestra
They are a really good band I was introduced to by my sister, who lives in Houston. I ended up going to see them in Glasgow last year, and they’ve got a catalogue of brilliant songs, though they still are not that well-known. They do have a small, but devoted, cult following, though!
The Silence, Manchester Orchestra
Again, not exactly mainstream, but this is a song that, when you hear it for the first time, you go, “Boy, where did that come from?” It’s an amazing song to put on while you’re driving.
Now and Then, The Beatles
There’s a fair bit of Beatles in my playlists, but I actually quite enjoyed this one they just recently released. My daughter makes playlists for me every year, and I remember this was on the 2023 one, so I listened to it a lot when I was in Australia visiting my son at that time.
Racing in the Street, Bruce Springsteen
Gotta have Bruce in there, and this is one you can’t help but include in a great playlist. I always loved the song. One year, my daughter told me, for my birthday (in early December), that she would learn to play it on piano for me as a Christmas present. It was actually quite hard, but she got all the opening bars right, and that was really special to me.
