BACKGROUND: The number of dementia patients will increase over the next decades. However, we lack information on the geographic distribution of these patients. We aimed to describe the variation of dementia prevalence and to then compare the observed to expected prevalence. 
METHODS: This study is based on a 20% sample of Medicare beneficiaries in 2008. The crude dementia prevalence was calculated and age/sex standardized to the US population for states. We used the World Alzheimer Report 2009 prevalence to compare estimates. RESULTS: 4.8 million persons were included. The adjusted prevalence is 8.24%, varying from 5.96 to 9.55% across states. The diagnosed prevalence is lower than the expected in most states. Overall, we estimate over 100 000 undiagnosed dementia patients in Medicare.
CONCLUSIONS: The high state variation suggests that the number of diagnosed dementia cases does not fall evenly across all states and hence may require different levels of state-level planning.

Dementia in the USA: state variation in prevalence

Early German Romanticism sought to respond to a comprehensive sense of spiritual crisis that characterised the late eighteenth century. The study demonstrates how the Romantics sought to bring together the new post-Kantian idealist philosophy with the inheritance of the realist Platonic-Christian tradition. With idealism they continued to champion the individual, while from Platonism they took the notion that all reality, including the self, participated in absolute being. This insight was expressed, not in the language of theology or philosophy, but through aesthetics, which recognised the potentiality of all creation, including artistic creation, to disclose the divine. In explicating the religious vision of Romanticism, this study offers a new historical appreciation of the movement, and furthermore demonstrates its importance for our understanding of religion today.

Romanticism and the Re-Invention of Modern Religion: The Reconciliation of German Idealism and Platonic Realism

The study assessed the relationships between mental health (loss, anxiety and depression), reconciliation sentiment (intra personal and interpersonal reconciliation sentiment), and dispositional forgiveness (lasting resentment, sensitivity to circumstances and unconditional forgiveness) among Rwandese survivors of the 1994 genocide. A sample of 72 females and 29 males living in the southern province of Rwanda, primary victims of the genocide (widows or children of killed people), was presented with questionnaires measuring these constructs. As hypothesized, (a) a strong, positive association was found between interpersonal reconciliation sentiment (trust and cooperation) and unconditional forgiveness, and (b) no significant associations were found between interpersonal reconciliation sentiment and the other two factors of the forgivingness construct: lasting resentment and sensitivity to circumstances. This pattern of associations was consistent with the view that, owing to the current situation in Rwanda where very few perpetrators have directly apologized, the only way for the victims to achieve a state of forgiveness is through unconditionally forgiving the people who harmed them.

Unconditional Forgiveness, Reconciliation Sentiment, and Mental Health Among Victims of Genocide in Rwanda

This study reports two stages of research into the discourses of poetry education in the United States from the early 20th to the early 21st centuries. The first is an original study that traces the history of discourses about teaching poetry, and the second is a coda or concluding analysis that raises questions about how history functions as a trope and whether or how the history of poetry education matters in the present. In the original study, we photocopied, inventoried, coded, and noted patterns of discourse over virtually every article published on the teaching of poetry in the oldest practice-oriented journal of literacy education in the United States, English Journal, from 1912 to 2005. In the coda that follows, we revisited and refined conclusions from our initial round of investigation in light of the theoretical implications of three models of historical and social change: Parsonian functionalist theories, Marxist/neo-Marxist theories of dialectical materialism, and Foucauldian theories of disc...

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1086296X14521194

On the Teaching of Poetry in English Journal, 1912-2005: Does History Matter?

Objectives: Whether and how patients should be told their dementia diagnosis, has been an area of much debate. While there is now recognition that early diagnosis is important for dementia care little research has looked at how dementia-related diagnostic information is actually verbally communicated. The limited previous research suggests that the absence of explicit terminology (e.g., use of the term Alzheimer's) is problematic. This paper interrogates this assumption through a conversation analysis of British naturalistic memory clinic interaction.

Method: This paper is based on video-recordings of communication within a UK memory clinic. Appointments with 29 patients and accompanying persons were recorded, and the corpus was repeatedly listened to, in conjunction with the transcripts in order to identify the segments of talk where there was an action hearable as diagnostic delivery, that is where the clinician is evaluating the patient's condition.

Results: Using a conversation analytic approach this analysis suggests that diagnostic communication, which is sensitive and responsive to the patient and their carers, is not predicated on the presence or absence of particular lexical choices. There is inherent complexity regarding dementia diagnosis, especially in the ‘early stages’, which is produced through and reflected in diagnostic talk in clinical encounters.

Conclusion: In the context of continuity of dementia care, diagnostic information is communicated in a way that conforms to intersubjective norms of minimizing catastrophic reactions in medical communication, and is sensitive to problems associated with ‘insight’ in terms of delivery and receipt or non-receipt of diagnosis.

/pdf/diagnostic-communication-in-the-memory-clinic-a-conversation-2v9pnz9o3r.pdf

Diagnostic communication in the memory clinic: a conversation analytic perspective

In this essay, I reconstruct Heller’s philosophy of history, arguing both that Heller’s position presents a serious intervention into modern theorizing about historical patternicity and that Heller’s position should be understood as a valuable hybrid, uniting her existential, ethical, and pragmatic bodies of work. For Heller, history is implicated indissolubly in the personal and ethical decision-making of individual actors. I conclude that Heller undermines postmodern claims about the relativism of history and scientific progress, notwithstanding initial appearances to the contrary.

Telling the truth: Heller as philosopher of history and personality

The Immanent Word: The Turn to Language in German Philosophy, 1759-1801

I link the fundamentalist zeal of Trumpism to its romantic anti-capitalist ideology, and I argue that Trumpism and its European counterparts have appropriated the imaginative plot of romantic anti-...

Katie Terezakis

Papers

Telling the truth: Heller as philosopher of history and personality

The Immanent Word: The Turn to Language in German Philosophy, 1759-1801

The Revival of Romantic Anti-Capitalism on the Right: A Synopsis Informed by Agnes Heller’s Philosophy

Book review: Freedom and Dissatisfaction in the Works of Agnes Heller: With and Against Marx:

Mind the Gap! On Dmitri Nikulin’s Case for the Affectionate Laughter of Agnes Heller