(Re-printed with permission).
What is your area
of research?
I have recently started working with Trinity Centre for Ageing and
Intellectual Disability. For over a decade, they have been running the Intellectual
Disability Supplement to the Irish Longitudinal Study on Ageing (IDS-TILDA: idstilda.tcd.ie). This is generating a
fantastic dataset from a nationally representative cohort of people with intellectual
disability (ID) aged 40+.
I am particularly interested in dementia in people with ID. This
population have a higher prevalence of dementia, and the onset happens at a
younger age, but detection of dementia in this cohort is quite different from
the general population, and this can be challenging for clinicians. Appropriate
end-of-life care for people with ID, another issue that is central to dementia,
remains a challenge; I’m also currently working with my colleagues on book
chapters that aim to provide a better understanding of the topic.
Right now, with the current COVID-19 crisis, we are developing
resources for people with ID, their families and support staff (e.g. easy read
materials, webinars for support staff). To find out more, see the following
link: https://www.tcd.ie/tcaid/about/covid19.php
What sparked your
interest in this area?
I have been interested in cognition for ages, but I’ve become
increasingly involved in the whole area of ageing and cognition in the last few
years. I have always believed that ageing is an intrinsically interesting
topic, but I think the research zeitgeist has also generated a lot of energy
around exploring the lives of older adults. So, when the opportunity arose with
IDS-TILDA to get involved with research in an underexplored older population, I
jumped at it.
What stage are
you at in your career and are there any achievements you are particularly proud
of?
I have worked in various research roles since finishing my PhD
about seven years ago. I’m approaching what a lot of funding agencies would
call “mid-career” - time can creep up on you.
In terms of recent output, I was happy to see a paper being
published about research on family dementia caregivers at University College
Cork and St. Finbarr’s Hospital. The findings draw attention to the importance
of safety issues as a cause of burden for family caregivers of people with
dementia. This was a very satisfying collaboration with the clinical team at
the memory clinic and old age psychiatry clinic as well (https://academic.oup.com/ageing/article-abstract/49/1/52/5637595).
What impact would
you like your research to have?
I think that most researchers involved in ageing are hoping to
maintain or improve people’s quality of life as they get older. But not
everyone ages in the same way and, as researchers, we have a role to play in
creating a better understanding of the diversity that exists in our older
populations so that policy and practice can adapt accordingly.
Who has helped or
inspired you in your area of research?
In my
experience, the teams that I’ve worked with are very collegial, and many team-mates
have helped me in some way (I hope I’ve helped them too). I’ve taken a strong
interest in psychology since the age of fourteen, so there have been a lot of
people who have inspired me. In the last couple of years, Richard Roche has
been a particular inspiration with his ability to pull together collaborators
from a wealth of disciplines. More recently, I think the scale and the staying
power of IDS-TILDA is really impressive, especially how they manage to retain
so many participants with very little drop-out. And with such a great dataset,
every day raises new questions.
Dementia in people with intellectual disabilities
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