in boston and with me today are stuart kargar owner of belmont manor nursing care and melissa shirt clip senior development officer for the massachusetts new hampshire greater boston walk thank you both so much for being here today thank you melissa can you tell us what is the current estimated number of people in the united states who are afflicted  fifteen million caregivers that are helping to take care of those individuals with alzheimer's and the impact of all survivors and family members and caregivers is huge stuart how long has your family o been there for the last thirty nine years running the building and we are committed to providing care for the elderly in belmont surrounding towns with all kinds of care from short term rehab to long term as well as alzheimer's care we do currently have a was so grateful for the care that she received there not only was i confident of her safety while i was at work but she was the staff there treated her with  they were so sweet to her that it felt like she was with family well remarkably allows us to have the physical space to keep a person but the biggest investment we have is in our staff all in and teaching and training and we're all the good and we we train our staff prior to going on the floor in dementia care at all times care and even you know the host keeping the dietary staff everyone in the building is trained so again we invest in our staff and recently the staff hosted a very very special evening of food wine live music and a raffles and there were many local merchants who also participated in that with donating baskets of merchandise and there were many restaurants plus dance studio movie theater hardware store donating gift certificates and the result was gr music i love to manage and the whole thing was great fun and it was very profitable as well and again the proceeds went to team belmont's walked and also timers so we thank you and the team about some disease by ourselves that takes everyone so bell might mean a working with the town of belmont the moment is really paying off this year and fortune i was not there last week but i did receive an email saying how wonderful it was and how involved it was and even the residents of belmont me to getting involved yes and we're looking forward to having a table at the walk and being involved wonderful i think i heard that you're going to have a table at  fantastic yes again it's about the staff if well i would just mention that when i was a child the the most scary disease of all was polio and i do have a dear friend who spent a significant amount of time in her early childhood in an iron lung now her left arm and hand are still paralyzed she still says suffers from question phobia but because of people like you who really care and supported research to end polio you don't even hear about polio anymore and that's like my prayer  huge effort being put on now with being able to diagnose it earlier mapping the brain and even social environment to be able to combat the disease and if they're able to detect it prior to there are things th can do to lessen it's fascinating the world right now and the role of g e and i look forward to reporting back on my next meeting when i when i go in there's also a huge amount of relation between alzheimer's and depression so they're looking at all these things that are correlating together and how we can maybe tune one thing up and fix one thing that will help with the elsham disease that is so wonderful  since my mom's passing i have been participating in clinical studies doing all simers walk for many years and you know if we just keep pushing on with this and  check in area opens at eight thirty am or speaking programs at ten am and then the walk begins right after the speaking program begins and we have a one and a half mile route and a three and a half mile route so it's an opportunity for anybody to come down participate we encourage people to bring their friends their family pets it's just a great day to bring the whole community together and raise awareness and raise funds for support and research and it is it is actually great fun it's along with charles river the walk and you know i worked in boston for many years but i've never gone there and it was fascinating i loved it and all the people along the way were just you know cheering us on and it was it was a wonderful experience i invite everyone out there to sign up and have a good time  and there are generous supporters belmont manners and a longtime supporter and sponsor of the greater boston walk as well as all of our sponsors and fund raising participants through that our goal right now is to raise one and a half one million dollars just from this for a while and so there are a large goal and looking to reach that goal and all the money that's raised as i mentioned goes to help support the care for the alzheimer's association which provides care and support to families that are impacted by also i'm aristos and you have a two hundred and forty seven correct people who find themselves suddenly in you know an emergency situation no cost to families which is why the fundraising piece of it is so important but just some of the care and support that we do provide is the two hundred and forty seven helpline who are available any time of day for whatever the reason and have license conditions that are answering the phones and helping to support and answer questions and provide resources for those families we also have support groups for people both individuals with the disease but also caregivers as well so many different support groups throughout massachusetts we offer education programs to help educate not only the community about also ime are cities and healthy living but also programs focus for caregiving so things like legal issues financial issues programs that will help support those caregivers we offer care consultations which are an opportunity to sit down and create a care plan for those families to what are the next steps what would we go from here so that care plan will help to to plan that out for them and then also just funding research that's a big piece of this and alzheimer's association is the largest nonprofit funder of alzheimer's research in the world it is fabulous and i didn't realize that they had so many different  consultation people available i mean that takes a lot of pressure off the caregivers and family caregivers excuse me who have all these decisions to make and you provide great counseling for them that's wonderful absolutely yeah yeah i i i really think that participates you know being right there participating whether it's in the war corps and in i mean there are a lot of different clinical studies going on and you and setting up people at all ages and they're able to map and predict whether to have alzheimer's and then they're looking at what medications they can develop to kind of combat the disease before it starts and you know clearly you know some of the programs that you have there i think are pentasa into you know the music and you know all kinds of things that that they have the help to calm them down and and well approach on in our mission is to do as many non pharmacological interventions of possible and music in memory on different activities small groups large groups if a woman were a host keeper and she like to use or hand maybe folding towels men that used to like to work with tools you know simulating that so we at any given time have several given activities going on in different locations or in the same room to keep people occupied so they don't become agitated or upset so that's our mission and again it's worked out really very very well in music and memory is one that we really work on very hard because music does camos people down he has sense of calm and we find up in the family what type of music the person like previously in life and try to use it so again you know it it all things work and the trial and error everyone little bit different and so we can have you know a manner for me was fabulous because i could walk there right my house and would often be there in our time and you know be able to see my mom sitting there smiling she couldn't carry on a conversation and didn't know names or anything like that but then if after dinner they had a music group or on the weekend they had a music group you could see the number of people that i didn't have good conversation skills anymore but by golly they remember that music and their feet would start moving and their whatever and it it just made starr smiling well the the the residents that don't have the communication skills that we find that the music of the dancing in the entertainment is a passive activity that they can really enjoy yeah we also find  different religious services brings them back oh yes and they were able to remember and they were able to really bring themselves back to a sense of really being feeling good about that so we look at those things from the past that we can and thirty years devastating yes scary very scary scary and we really do have to find a cure and i feel encouraged that there is such a great effort to do that because it is devastating and the extremely expensive as well and taking all the millions one million dollars and so i think that's when the government kind of looks as ok i think we need to do something that yeah  nt is not the only community doing this i mean they're doing it all over the united states right now but this is what we're doing is is a community effort that i'm really proud of belmont for doing i'm very happy to be part of because you know you feel it in your community i have signs out in front of my house you know the alzheimer's walk and the number of people walk by and stuff and read it and and chat about it for a little bit it's people care they really do and there's almost almost no family that i've talked to that doesn't have at least one member of the family or a close friend of the family with  experience with it seems to me yes it's that that prevalent now so i mean just in going around to the merchants and asking them to donate for instance for the for the raffle i was hearing all year that something is very important to me because you know my grandmother had or my mother had it and they they really do care and what's wonderful this year is that i'm the private sector myself elmo manor and the town of belmont porking together yes i love that we're doing and it's over and so we're all going to gather at the transportation on the green line either the leach mayor stop or the science park stop and again it's just a great opportunity for people to get involved and to participate and to do something the walk  is an opportunity for everybody to participate there's no registration fee and there's no fund raising requirement so you don't have to raise a certain amount of money in order to participate fund raising is appreciated encouraged because it helps to further the mission but you don't have to raise a certain amount of money even there were everybody that was there raised one hundred dollars it would make a huge difference and can make a big impact so well even if everybody there contributed something didn't have to be a one hundred dollars they could still walk and really you know hopefully bring friends and family and you know it all works and i invite all of you to join us and come have fun we are going to be marching along it's not a race it's not you know competitive it's just a wonderful time being with people who really care about the object of the walk and last year i had a wonderful time and it was a beautiful beautiful walk all along and so come have fun with us and meanwhile we will continue doing the you know clearing together yes collaborating together and also being active in organizations that are doing research  the one that i work with this is boston university and be a medical center and they're all just you know really determined to keep working on this and do it together in and share that information that they get this so far hopefully just so anything else we can add to this i think that we covered it  yeah ok well that is our show for today and again i invite you to come and have fun with us and contribute to this wonderful cause too and a horrible horrible disease so and i also please come back to belmont media center and are they what's going on show and