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[Title card animation: Dementia Australia Research Foundation – Understand]
[Dr Stephanie Wong, The University of Sydney]
Dr Stephanie: I am Dr Stephanie Wong, and I'm a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the Brain and Mind Centre at the University of Sydney. Dementia is actually an umbrella term that we use to describe a whole range of different disorders that affect people when there are certain neurodegenerative changes in their brain. I n Australia, there's about, at the moment, over 300,000 people affected with dementia in general, and younger onset dementia is a specific type that affects people at a younger age.
In terms of my research, I'm particularly interested in handling of their own finances and susceptibility to financial scams, which has been identified as a particular problem in these younger cohort. So, what I did to really address this issue is to develop a set of cognitive tests to look at different areas of financial skills from more everyday things like handling cash, paying bills, everyday budgeting, all the way through to spotting financial scams, looking at things like gullibility, and also, higher-level financial skills such as understanding legal terminology like power of attorney, and other financial judgment and reasoning tasks.
Thanks to Dementia Australia supporting my research, we hope that people with younger onset dementia can be earlier identified as having these sorts of problems with their financial management skills. And if we identify these problems earlier on, then we can target them with different management strategies and interventions much earlier. So hopefully, we can avoid them having given away all their savings, or have problems in these sorts of areas.
Throughout my PhD, I received a top-up scholarship from Dementia Australia Research Foundation. This was really crucial in supporting the final stages of my research and completing my PhD. My very first project grant was also from Dementia Australia Research Foundation, and that's supporting the beginnings of my research into financial difficulties in younger onset dementia. And since then, this has led to a number of other funding opportunities to expand my research in this area, so I've been really lucky to have gotten that first research grant, which has then led to so many other opportunities for my research.
At the moment, what our research focuses on is identifying the problem, and once we have done this and we have understood more about the problems that people are facing in terms of their finances, then we can develop management strategies and interventions for how best to really address this. And this will benefit not only the person with dementia themselves, but also their family members.
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This research is supported by:
Hazel Hawke Research Grant in Dementia Care
Alzheimer’s Australia Dementia Research Foundation
PhD Top-up Scholarship
Brain and Mind Centre, The University of Sydney
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Dementia Australia Research Foundation:
A cure is just the beginning
If you would like to see dementia research make real impact, donate today:
1300 636 679
www.dementia.org.au/donate-research
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