Jason Karlawish is a physician and writer.

He researches and writes about issues at the intersections of bioethics, aging, and the neurosciences. He is the author of The Problem of Alzheimer’s: How Science, Culture, and Politics Turned a Rare Disease into a Crisis and What We Can Do About It and the novel Open Wound: The Tragic Obsession of Dr. William Beaumont. His essays have been published in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Forbes, The Hill, The Los Angeles Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer, STAT, and The Washington Post. His STAT column Neurotransmissions examines the vast problem of dementia. A Professor of Medicine, Medical Ethics and Health Policy, and Neurology at the University of Pennsylvania, he is co-Director of the Penn Memory Center, where he cares for patients, and executive producer of the Age of Aging, a podcast that examines how to live well with an aging brain. He lives in Philadelphia.

Dementia finally has a business model

Though treatments and diagnostics are exciting, the big takeaway from AAIC2026 is an economic message

In the nine years since my last visit to the Docklands’ Excel conference center for the 2017 annual Alzheimer Association International Conference, or AAIC, little of London’s infrastructure has changed. I traveled via the same low-ceilinged, clattering trains with signs advising riders to “mind the gap” and “mind the step.” The center has the same weird jack-o-lantern-esque façade and forgettable restaurants and hotels. I was even here for the same conference.

Same meeting, in the same place, but what transpired was quite different. In just nine years, how we think about the aging brain has transformed.

One moment captured this. It was a speaker’s remark at a breakfast meeting convened by the Davos Alzheimer’s Collaborative. The five-year-old organization describes itself as “uniting leading organizations worldwide to build an innovation ecosystem that will accelerate breakthroughs, develop and scale promising solutions and equip every healthcare system to end Alzheimer's disease everywhere.”

The speaker said: “We need to think of the brain as infrastructure”…..

The ACED tool

Why have thousands of psychologists, physicians, caregivers and social workers from all over the world requested a copy of the ACED? Because they know that to promote the well-being and dignity of a person with marginal capacity, the person needs an assessment of the capacity for everyday decisionmaking.