By Rick Vacek | January 13, 2025
Medical advancements have accelerated the world population toward the Age of the Aged. By comparison, progress in preventing and treating age-related decline is stuck in slow motion.
By 2050, the World Health Organization predicts, the number of people at least 60 years old will double and the 80-and-up age group will triple.
“The economic healthcare infrastructure of the world cannot handle what is likely coming,” said Dr. Adam J. Woods, the new dean of the School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences (BBS).
Woods, who arrived at The University of Texas at Dallas in August, is a cognitive neuroscientist who has devoted his research to solving the mysteries and effects of Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia.
“It’s often the families that are the most impacted,” he said. “In most cases, the disease process takes everything the person has financially, and then it starts taking everything the family has. The family isn’t prepared to provide the around-the-clock care needed because they’re still working, and they’re sometimes not trained or prepared for the kind of care the person needs.
“It’s very hard on the individual, of course, but as you stop remembering a variety of things happening to and around you as the disease progresses, you’re a lot less affected than those who have to experience every moment of that loss.”
From dollars to basic dignity, it’s a growing crisis that seemingly impacts just about every family.
There are so many heartbreaking stories amid sometimes inspirational resilience.
But there are not as many solutions … yet.
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The author’s story:
Well into her 90s, Mom would send at least five emails in a day, sometimes even 10. They usually contained things she had seen on the internet, from a clip of a funny television segment to a tip about a household product. It was her way of staying in touch.
Today, with her fingers mangled by rheumatoid arthritis, much of her eyesight robbed by macular degeneration and her mobility severely limited by the effects of living 103 years, the former court reporter’s beloved computer is gone. Her short-term memory is headed down the same path, but she still can talk for hours about what happened 80 years ago. It is more fascinating than sad, more heartwarming than heartbreaking, and her caretakers agree: She is remarkable.
Woods watched his great grandmother live independently until she was 95. “She was brilliant and loved living by herself in her little house,” he said. “And then in the last three months of her life, things just snapped.”
For too many families, the suffering lasts much longer as a life that had been devoted to work and play and family and friends suddenly becomes a survival test. It’s an even lonelier challenge if family members don’t live nearby.
Finding joy amid the sorrow is as difficult as the search for what causes the brain to succumb while the body is still healthy.
Woods has seen the other side, too. His 87-year-old grandmother lives alone and still manages a farm.
“The women in my family live so long; I wish I could say the same thing about the men. We’re lucky if we make it to 75,” he said, smiling.
It’s why he is so diligent about seeking proactive solutions in both his research and his life.
“The things I could remember and do in my 20s are just not possible now in my 40s, and it’s only going to get worse from here,” he said. “The aches and all that – I’m starting to be like my grandfather. Darn it, this is not going to get better.
“So, what we tried to do was find ways to intervene early, to improve function, to change trajectories of decline. If you change the trajectory, you can change when you’re afflicted by some of these things like Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia. If you wait until you see the obvious symptoms, the pathology is so far gone at that point and there’s not a great deal we can do.”
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Mom didn’t have to stop driving at age 90; she just decided it was time. But she was determined to keep living alone and running the retirement community’s ceramics studio into the second half of her 90s before it became obvious that she couldn’t take care of herself any longer.
It wasn’t obvious to her, however – she still decries the doctor’s order that relegated her to assisted living. She since has graduated to full-time care in a facility she found on her own … with her computer. And she has found some positives: “They get me up in the morning and dress me like I’m a baby, and you know what? I kind of like it!”
As eager as Woods is to find therapeutic solutions for dementia, he also understands the need for regulatory processes. But that doesn’t make the pace any less frustrating.
“Even at the fastest of rates, if you find something that has real promise, it can take 20 years to become something real and deliverable in a clinical space,” he said. “The speed of movement – of technologies, medicine, pharmaceuticals – it’s slow.”
Here’s why:
“I go out and get a grant and say, ‘I’ve got this great idea. Let’s go test it and see if it really is a good idea.’ OK, we do that – that takes five years. Once we have this initial experimental evidence in an early phase clinical trial, we then need to pursue another grant to test our initial findings in Phase II clinical trial – this takes another five years.
“Assuming we find a positive effect in this initial trial, then I need to get another grant to test at a Phase III level whether the effect reaches a level that is definitively clinically meaningful. This adds another five years. Now, after 15 years and significant evidence of impact, we need to engage with the FDA (Food and Drug Administration) and industry to attempt to move the therapeutic approach through regulatory processes and ultimately to market.
“Guess what? That’s another five, 10 years because they likely need to run their own industry-sponsored and FDA-regulated trial. They can usually do it faster, with lots of money, in two years, but the reality is you’re a minimum of 15 years away, usually 20-plus years away, from a good idea having clinical impact.”
Instead, it’s not unusual to see noninvasive, nonpharmaceutical interventions such as cognitive training – e.g., electronic computer games. It’s part of finding a winning formula for the brain.
“It is the organ we know the least about,” Woods said. “It’s this wonderfully complex organ that does amazing things and is the core of who we are as individuals and as a species. We’re still learning about the nuances of its structure, many nuances of its function, much less how these things interact for behavior.
“That’s literally what the behavioral and brain sciences do, which is what makes this place amazing. We’re a school entirely focused on this concept, in doing this at either the behavioral or the brain level but always at the intersection. We’ve got a lot to learn, so we’ve got a lot of questions to ask.”
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Mom’s facility seeks to keep the residents active as much as possible. There are singalongs and balloon volleyball games to go with the frequent games of cards and, of course, bingo.
A day brightener for family members is a photo of Mom proudly holding her bingo prize – a dollar bill. That’s one short-term experience she doesn’t forget. “I haven’t spent it yet!” she says proudly.
The story of how Woods landed at UT Dallas begins with how he almost didn’t apply for the position. He thought it was “really interesting” when he first saw it, but he wasn’t looking to leave the University of Florida.
Weeks later, he woke up in a cold sweat in the middle of the night and said to himself, “I made a horrible mistake. UT Dallas is the one place I’ve ever seen that has everything I care about. It has health sciences and healthcare. It has psychology. It has neuroscience. It has cognitive neuroscience. It’s training clinicians. It’s training bench scientists. It’s doing everything I’ve ever cared about and done, all in one place.”
“This is exactly where I want to be, and it’s because of the people.”
DR. ADAM J. WOODS
Fortunately, the hiring committee was still in the process of sifting through candidates, and Woods soon was as impressed with UT Dallas up close as he was from afar: “This is exactly where I want to be, and it’s because of the people.”
His experiences during the fall semester, from handing out ice cream during the Weeks of Welcome to taking a selfie with the BBS students in the audience during his Commencement speech, only confirmed his intuition. He wants his work to have an impact, and now he can have more of an impact than ever.
“Early in my career, it was about the impact I could have through my science or being in a classroom,” he said. “But then as I advanced in my career, it became about the impact I could facilitate in others around me. Because then I could go from facilitating my one lab to facilitating a hundred labs and from teaching a hundred students to teaching thousands of students.
“Being able to facilitate impact, that’s what gets me out of bed in the morning. That’s what gets me excited when I’m in my chair and when I’m meeting with my faculty. I can see their impact, and then my job is to find how I can accelerate and elevate that impact.
“That means an impact on people. Not just an impact on, ‘We learned something.’ It’s an impact on, ‘We learned something, and we did something with it, and it made a difference. And that difference can be small, but small differences can lead to big differences.’”
Every behavioral and brain scientist – and thousands of families – no doubt would agree.
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Mom’s status as a centenarian does have one perk: She often is asked to share her advice about what it takes to live into triple digits.
“Just be happy,” she says.
It’s a worthy goal, and Dr. Adam J. Woods is determined to make it possible for more than just a few lucky souls. The world population clock is ticking.