but who will take care of the present? (2026)
Lisa Bormans is a clinical psychologist and doctoral researcher at KU Leuven. She investigates how people living with dementia and their caregivers experience the condition and give it meaning.
Yet this hopeful narrative also raises questions. When we articulate the ambition to one day stop Alzheimer’s, it implicitly frames the condition first and foremost as a problem to be solved. That dementia involves suffering is undeniable. But when dementia is reduced solely to suffering and loss, we risk erasing what people with dementia can still do, feel, and contribute.
This reduction is amplified in public debate through the language used to describe life with dementia. On the 10 February broadcast of De Afspraak, neurobiologist Prof. Bart De Strooper described people with dementia as “empty shells” who “die twice.” Such problem‑focused imagery may feel intuitive when one wants to communicate the severity of the condition. But language is performative—it shapes reality. When dementia is consistently described only in terms of what is no longer there, this shapes how society understands and approaches the condition. People with dementia become less full members of society, more like individuals already fading away.
Our KU Leuven–funded research shows that people with dementia are far more than their cognitive decline. In our interviews and co-creative sessions, we see that people with dementia have a strong sense of who they are, what matters to them, and how they wish to be approached, understood, and remembered. When words become fewer, they express themselves through images, movement, rhythm, or interaction. What changes is not a person’s identity or humanity, but the way we access it. This perspective was recently captured beautifully in Kat Steppe’s debut film Zondag de Negenste.
This brings us to a second question: how do investments in treatment relate to investments in care? Five million euros for research is substantial—especially in a climate of cuts to the care sector. Thousands of people with dementia live today in residential care centres or at home, supported by family caregivers who often find themselves stretched to their limits. Their needs do not lie in a future breakthrough but in the here and now: the shortage of day care facilities, care staff insufficiently trained in dementia‑sensitive approaches, the lack of adapted housing, and the scarcity of psychosocial support.
Questioning dominant narratives is not an argument against clinical research. Research on dementia is vital and deserves support. But alongside the rhetoric of breakthroughs and cures, there must be space for a discourse that recognises life with dementia as meaningful. A discourse that does not only speak of stopping and curing, but also of accompanying, supporting, and living together.
“Can we ever stop the disease? Absolutely!” Perhaps. But even if we do, our responsibility remains to care for those living with dementia today. Hope for the future is valuable. But care for the present is indispensable.