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Opinion: With no dementia cure in sight, it’s time for communities to become dementia friendly

Dementia friendly projects can spark our imaginations about what makes a community a good place to live and show us how to learn from people with dementia and their caregivers.
A group of people with dementia, their caregivers, and officials from a local nursing home talk, drink coffee, and eat cookies at Connections Cafe in Watertown, Wis., as part of a support and social group.

For baby boomers and their parents, there’s no biomedical solution in sight for preventing or curing dementia. That means we need to help people face the prospect of living with dementia and support families affected by it through dementia-friendly policies aligned with their needs.

Where should we start? One place is at the movies.

While I was in Liverpool this summer for the annual conference of the British Society of Gerontology, I spotted a poster for a monthly series of classic films at a local cinema. Printed inside a big pink circle in the poster’s corner were the words “dementia friendly.” I

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