‘If I’m totally dependent and unable to recognise my family, I would like VAD’: Professor Henry Brodaty on dementia
The world-leading researcher describes how the heartbreaking decline of his young father shaped his future career.
For a clinician whose life’s work has shown that dementia can be prevented or delayed through behavioural change, Professor Henry Brodaty does talk about the darkness of the condition, specifically the cruel death it inflicts.
His father, Jacob, was diagnosed in his early 50s after surviving the Holocaust, Soviet labour camps and typhus.
He remembers taking him for respite care at a Jewish day centre at Maccabean Hall in Sydney, where to occupy him he would be asked to fill small boxes with rubber bands.
“He had to put enough rubber bands in this little matchbox so it balanced with a weight on a scale. He couldn’t grasp that concept,” recalls Professor Brodaty, co-director of the Centre for Healthy Brain Ageing at UNSW Sydney.
