Amerika Samoa Mental Health Summit looking at helping people live a healthy life

Pago Pago, AMERICAN SAMOA — Dr. James Galvin from the University of Miami, is an investigator, neurologist and specializes in studying Alzheimer disease and brain health.

He is here with a team of two others, for a three-day Amerika Samoa Mental Health Summit at the American Samoa Community College — ASCC Multipurpose Center.

On day one following the program, he was talking about Brain Health Research and Provider Services.  

For this Project, according to Dr. Galvin, in an interview with Samoa News on Tuesday after an Ava Ceremony to welcome them, he said they try to understand “how people live in American Samoa, how their brain ages and what we could do in order to help prevent brain disease.

“Our goal is to try to help people live a healthy life.

“And in order to do that we need to understand what puts people at risk developing diseases like Alzheimer, which is worldwide the most common problem as people get older.”

The Amerika Samoa Mental Health Summit, was broadcast live from the venue on Wednesday, Nov. 1, 2023.

Dr. Galvin, during his presentation, spoke about Alzheimer Disease’s ‘scary’ numbers.

“The Alzheimer's Association has lots of really scary numbers — they talk about 6.2 million Americans have signs of disease-related disorders.

“A new case is diagnosed every 42 seconds.

“ Alzheimer's Disease is the fifth leading cause of death in the United States involving the adults at age 65, and there's roughly a 2% chance of having it by age 85, and over a 40% chance of having it, those are really scary numbers,” he said.

As, “health providers we spend a lot of time talking about disease and disability and death,” but “we spend very little time talking about health and vitality and capabilities.

“We spend a lot of time talking about life expectancy.”

Dr. Galvin pointed out that “wanting to understand brain health”  is “because the goal ultimately is to try to prevent disease.”

The best way to develop prevention measures is to figure out what makes people at a higher risk for developing disease compared to some other people.

“What are things we do as we grow older that puts our brain at a higher risk?” he asked.

The Neurologist said, “There's a lot of paper — scientific papers out there that have studied this and things like low education diameters, hearing loss, head injury, smoking, drinking, air pollution, socialization, hypertension, hypercholesterolemia and obesity.”

Furthermore he said these are the things that increase the risk of developing a big disease like Alzheimer's.

He said, “if I can better understand how it evolved and better understand it so our group can better understand.

“Then maybe we can develop measures that will benefit everybody in a really broad way because most research is done on people who look like me.”

Dr. Galvin said, most of those numbers he talked about are from European white individuals.

However he reminds, “If you only study one group then everything you learn is only true for that one group.

“The biology of Alzheimer's probably is not different between different groups but how one gets there might be  — but without studying people from all walks of life, from all backgrounds, all ethnicity groups, from geographic locations, and studying both women and men, can we really understand disease?”

Dr. Galvin noted that the goal of this project is to “collect risk”, but look at those less likely to develop disease.

“Most studies,” he said, “would just focus on risk factors, they just want to hear, if you have diabetes, if you have hypertension.”

However, Dr Galvin said, “the importance of thinking about participating in the study is because it's not just about whether I have Alzheimer's or not, because most of you don’t, but what can you do to enhance your brain health.”

“How do you combine a healthy body with a healthy mind with a healthy spirit to have a healthy brain?”

Day two of the Mental Health Summit, is today, Thursday, and will be about substance use and suicide prevention, and then close off tomorrow, Friday, with a Yout