Walking the talk for dementia: A unique immersive, embodied, and multi-experiential initiative.

Coping with dementia requires an integrated approach encompassing personal, health, research, and community domains. Here we describe "Walking the Talk for Dementia," an immersive initiative aimed at empowering people with dementia, enhancing dementia understanding, and inspiring collaborations. This initiative involved 300 participants from 25 nationalities, including people with dementia, care partners, clinicians, policymakers, researchers, and advocates for a 4-day, 40 km walk through the Camino de Santiago de Compostela, Spain. A 2-day symposium after the journey provided novel transdisciplinary and horizontal structures, deconstructing traditional hierarchies. The innovation of this initiative lies in its ability to merge a physical experience with knowledge exchange for diversifying individuals' understanding of dementia. It showcases the transformative potential of an immersive, embodied, and multi-experiential approach to address the complexities of dementia collaboratively. The initiative offers a scalable model to enhance understanding, decrease stigma, and promote more comprehensive and empathetic dementia care and research.

Diffusion tensor imaging in a child with hypertrophic olivary degeneration.

Hypertrophic olivary degeneration (HOD) is caused by disruptive lesions affecting components of the Guillain-Mollaret triangle (GMT). We present conventional magnetic resonance and diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) findings in a 6-year-old girl with HOD after surgery for a midbrain pilocytic astrocytoma. To our knowledge, this is the first dedicated DTI analysis of GMT in a child with HOD in the literature. In our patient, we found higher fractional anisotropy (FA) and axial diffusivity values of the inferior olivary nucleus (ION) and lower FA, but higher radial diffusivity (RD) values of all other GMT components compared to age-matched controls. Increased FA values of the ION may be explained by increased packing of white matter fibers. However, associated hyperintense T2 signal is contradictory and the association between increased FA values and hyperintense T2 signal remains unclear. Low FA and high RD values of the other GMT components likely reflect demyelination with axonal degeneration and correlate well with histopathological findings.