As the pres­i­dent and med­ical direc­tor of the Alzheimer’s Research and Pre­ven­tion Foun­da­tion (ARPF), it’s my job to stay on top of advances in the field of Alzheimer’s research. Recently, a num­ber of arti­cles in the med­ical lit­er­a­ture have caught my atten­tion. They are focused on a par­tic­u­lar ques­tion that con­cerns most Baby Boomers like me: “Is mem­ory loss just a nor­mal part of aging?” Read the rest of this entry »

Dr. John Docherty is an Adjunct Pro­fes­sor of Psy­chi­a­try at the Weill Med­ical Col­lege, Cor­nell Uni­ver­sity, Direc­tor of Post Grad­u­ate Edu­ca­tion there, and Chief Med­ical Offi­cer of Brain Resource. Trained as a clin­i­cal research fel­low in neu­ropsy­chophar­ma­col­ogy at NIMH, he later returned as Chief of the Psy­choso­cial Treat­ments Research Branch, respon­si­ble for all fed­er­ally sup­ported psy­choso­cial treat­ment research in men­tal health nation­wide. He over­saw the land­mark National Col­lab­o­ra­tive Study of the Treat­ment of Depres­sion and served as a mem­ber and Chair­man for over 10 years on the NIMH and then NIDA Treat­ment Research IRGs. Dr. Docherty has wide expe­ri­ence in suc­cess­fully imple­ment­ing inno­va­tion in both clin­i­cal oper­a­tions and man­aged health care. He founded North­east Psy­chi­atric Asso­ciates in 1985. As National Med­ical Direc­tor for National Med­ical Enter­prises, he over­saw med­ical con­trol and qual­ity improve­ment in 74 hos­pi­tals in 34 states. He was the Exec­u­tive Vice-President and Chief Med­ical Offi­cer for Merit Behav­ioral Care, which then cov­ered 30 mil­lion peo­ple. In 1998, he founded Com­pre­hen­sive Neu­ro­Science (CNS). Its Care Man­age­ment Tech­nolo­gies are cur­rently imple­mented in 17 state Med­ic­aid plans. Dr Docherty has received numer­ous hon­ors and awards and has authored over 100 sci­en­tific publications.

(Editor’s note: this inter­view with Dr. John Docherty was orig­i­nally pub­lished in Sharp­Brains’ mar­ket report Trans­form­ing Brain Health with Dig­i­tal Tools to Assess, Enhance and Treat Cog­ni­tion across the Lifes­pan, pub­lished in July 2010)

Alvaro Fer­nan­dez: Dr. Docherty, it is a plea­sure to be with you today to dis­cuss the main theme of Sharp­Brains’ 2010 mar­ket report – how the con­ver­gence of sci­en­tific find­ings and tech­nol­ogy plat­forms and tools is reshap­ing how as a soci­ety and as indi­vid­u­als we will take care of cog­ni­tion and men­tal well­ness along the life­course, giv­ing birth to the emerg­ing dig­i­tal brain health and fit­ness mar­ket. Can you first briefly dis­cuss your career tra­jec­tory and your cur­rent role at Brain Resource?

Dr. John Docherty: Sure. The main theme of my work since the 1960s has remained the same, “How do we put knowl­edge into effec­tive use to improve men­tal health?” Over the last cen­tury, med­i­cine made tremen­dous progress in gen­er­at­ing sci­en­tific and clin­i­cal knowl­edge. Basic research dis­cov­ery sci­ence and clin­i­cal treat­ment devel­op­ment sci­ence have made great progress. Within Psy­chi­a­try there was stan­dard set­ting advance in the 1960’s through the NIMH-VA coop­er­a­tive stud­ies to the method­ol­ogy of assess­ing the effi­cacy of psy­chophar­ma­co­log­i­cal drugs. This work estab­lished prin­ci­ples adopted for the study of med­ica­tions in the other areas of med­i­cine. The study of psy­chother­apy, how­ever, lagged in devel­op­ment. In my role of Chief of the Psy­choso­cial Treat­ments Branch of the NIMH , I helped con­tribute to the advance of that work by sup­port­ing the efforts of an extra­or­di­nary group of indi­vid­u­als led by Irene Waskow who car­ried out the TDCRP. This study estab­lished the method­olo­gies that made pos­si­ble the effec­tive sci­en­tific study of the effi­cacy of psy­chother­a­pies. The evi­dence base and of such treat­ments as CBT, DBT, Moti­va­tional Enhance­ment Treat­ment and other evidence-based psy­chother­a­pies derives directly from this study and its sem­i­nal influ­ence. This was a con­tri­bu­tion to the sci­ence of Clin­i­cal Treat­ment Devel­op­ment research.

I would say that my major inter­est, how­ever, has been in the next step, the sci­ence of knowl­edge trans­fer. There has been and remains a long and costly (in terms par­tic­u­larly of unnec­es­sary suf­fer­ing) lag between the devel­op­ment of new knowl­edge and its com­mon and effec­tive use in practice.

In order the help the field moved for­ward, I have worked for the last 20 years in the devel­op­ment and imple­men­ta­tion of meth­ods to effec­tively trans­fer knowl­edge into prac­tice. Read the rest of this entry »

Round-up of inter­est­ing recent news on cog­ni­tive health and fit­ness: the field is in motion.

1) Bay­crest cre­ates Cen­tre for Brain Fit­ness with $10-million Invest­ment from Ontario Gov­ern­ment (Canada NewsWire)

2) Cog­ni­tive tests are the best way to select med­ical stu­dents (EurekAlert)

3) High blood pres­sure hard on the aging brain (Reuters)

4) Alzheimer’s tests ben­e­fi­cial for seniors (Atlanta-Journal Constitutional)

5) Dementia-Dreading Baby Boomers Spur Race to Invent Brain Games (Bloomberg)

6) Viv­ity Labs launches Fit Brains brain-training game site (VentureBeat) 

7) Depres­sion and Alzheimer’s (NHS Choices)

For selected quotes and com­ments, Read the rest of this entry »

I find via Mind­Hacks that NYT Mag­a­zine has pub­lished a great arti­cle titled The Gre­gar­i­ous Brain, sub­ti­tled “Williams syn­drome — a genetic acci­dent that causes cog­ni­tive deficits-”. The writer, David Dobbs, does an spec­tac­u­lar job at explain­ing that syn­drome in the con­text of what cog­ni­tive skills are and how they evolved. Some sam­ple quotes:

• “In the view of two of Bellugi’s fre­quent col­lab­o­ra­tors, Albert Gal­aburda, a Har­vard Med­ical School pro­fes­sor of neu­rol­ogy and neu­ro­science, and Allan Reiss, a neu­ro­sci­en­tist at the Stan­ford School of Med­i­cine, Nicki’s learned facil­ity at sports talk illus­trates a cen­tral les­son of Williams and, for that mat­ter, mod­ern genet­ics: genes (or their absence) do not hard-wire peo­ple for cer­tain behav­iors. There is no gene for under­stand­ing cal­cu­lus. But genes do shape behav­ior and per­son­al­ity, and they do so by cre­at­ing brain struc­tures and func­tions that favor cer­tain abil­i­ties and appetites more than others.”
• “…This doesn’t mean that spe­cific behav­iors are hard-wired. M.I.T. math majors aren’t born doing cal­cu­lus, and peo­ple with Williams don’t enter life telling sto­ries. As Allan Reiss put it: “It’s not just ‘genes make brain make behav­ior.’ You have envi­ron­ment and expe­ri­ence too. By envi­ron­ment, Reiss means less the atmos­phere of a home or a school than the end­less string of chal­lenges and oppor­tu­ni­ties that life presents any per­son start­ing at birth.”
• (Talk­ing about when our ances­tors started to live in larger groups) “But the big­ger groups imposed a new brain load: the mem­bers had to be smart enough to bal­ance their indi­vid­ual needs with those of the pack. This meant coop­er­at­ing and exer­cis­ing some indi­vid­ual restraint. It also required Read the rest of this entry »