Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to First Unitarian Society of Madison. This is a community where curious seekers gather to explore spiritual, ethical, and social issues in an accepting and nurturing environment. Unitarian universalism supports the freedom of conscience of each individual as together we seek to be a force for good in the world. My name is Leslie Ross, and on behalf of the congregation, I would like to extend a special welcome to our many visitors here today.  Today is a very special worship service because it is our coming-of-age worship service. We are privileged to hear from an impressive group of youth who have spent the past eight months in our coming-of-age program. As many of you know, coming-of-age is the final class in our children's religious education program and is our rite of passage marking the transition from child to adolescent. The coming-of-age program offers experiences that help our youth to better understand who they are, who they hope to be, and what beliefs ground and guide them on their way. Their time has been richly spent with classroom experiences, time with their elders, and self-reflection. This I believe is an international program that engages people in writing and sharing essays that describe the core values that guide their daily lives. Our coming-of-age teens have heard and discussed many of these essays during the year. Then they set themselves down to write their own essays which they will bravely share with you today. Their words as well as their musical contributions to today's service are sure to inspire hope and awe. And now, let's welcome our coming-of-age team of teens, facilitators, and elders.  They are the sons and daughters of life's longing for itself. They come through you, but not from you. And though they are with you, yet they belong not to you. You may give them your love, but not your thoughts, for they have their own thoughts. You may house their bodies, but not their souls. For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams. You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you. For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday. Please rise in all ways we do and join us in saying the chalice lighting affirmation found in your order of service. We'll be starting with the second one, the more traditional chalice lighting. Take courage, friends. The way is often hard. The path is never clear. And the stakes are very high. Take courage, for deep down there is another truth. You are not alone. And now, our second chalice lighting that the younger audience may recognize. We are Unitarian Universalists. This is the church of the open mind. This is the church of the loving heart. This is the church of the helping hands. Together, we care for our Earth and work for peace and friendship in our world. Please turn to your neighbor to exchange friendly greetings. Please join us in singing our opening hymn, number 346. Back in the days when the grass was still green and the pond was still wet and the clouds were still clean and the song of the swammy swamps still rang out in peace. One morning I came to this glorious place. And I saw the trees, the truffula trees, the brightly colored tuffs of the truffula trees, mile after mile in the fresh morning breeze. And under the trees, I saw brown barbalutes frisking about in their barbalute suits as they play in the shade and ate truffle fruits. From the ripulous pond came the comfortable sounds of the humming fish humming while splashing around. But those trees, those trees, those truffula trees, all my life, I'd been searching for trees such as these. I felt a great leaping of joy in my heart. I knew just what I'd do. I unloaded my cart. In no time at all, I had built a small shop. Then I chopped down a truffula tree with one chop. And with great skillful skill and with great speedy speed, I took the soft tuff and knitted a thneed. The instant I'd finished, I heard a gazump. I looked. I saw something pop out of the stump of the tree I'd chopped down. It was sort of a man. Describe him. That's hard. I don't know if I can. Mr., he said, with a sawdusty sneeze, I am a Lorax. I speak for the trees. I speak for the trees, for the trees have no tongues. And I'm asking you, sir, at the top of my lungs. He was very upset as he shouted and puffed. What's that thing you've made out of the truffula troughs? Look, Lorax, I said, there's no cause for alarm. I chopped just one tree. I'm doing no harm. I'm being quite useful. This thing is a thneed. A thneed's a fine something that all people need. The Lorax said, sir, you are crazy with greed. There is no one on earth who would buy that full thneed. But in no time at all, in the factory I built, the whole one-seller family was working full tilt. We were all knitting thneeds just as busy as bees to the sound of the chopping of truffula trees.  Now chopping one tree at a time was too slow. So I quickly invented my super axe hacker, which whacked off four truffula trees with one smacker. We were making thneeds four times as fast as before. And that Lorax, he didn't show up anymore. But the next week, he knocked on my new office door. He snapped, I'm the Lorax who speaks for the trees, which you seem to be chopping as fast as you please. But I'm also in charge of the brown barbalutes who played in the shade with their barbalute suits and happily lived eating truffula fruits. Now, thanks to your hacking my trees to the ground, there's not enough truffula fruit to go round. And my poor barbalutes are all getting the crummies because they have gas and no food in their tummies. They loved living here, but I can't let them stay. They'll have to find food, and I hope that they may. Good luck, boys, he cried and he sent them away. I, the once-ler, felt sad as I watched them all go. But business is business and business must grow, regardless of crummies and tummies, you know? Then again, he came back. I was fixing some pipes. When that old nuisance Lorax came with more gripes, I'm the Lorax he coughed and he whiffed. He sneezed and he snuffed. He snarled, he sniffed. Once-ler, he cried with a cruffulous croak. Once-ler, you're making such smogulous smoke. My poor swami swams, why, they can't sing a note. No one can sing when they have smog in their throat. And so, said the Lorax, please pardon my cough. They cannot live here, so I'm sending them off. Where will they go? I don't hopefully know. They may have to fly for a month or a year to escape from the fog. Smog, you've smogged around here. And at that very moment, we heard a loud whack. From outside in the fields came a sickening smack of an axe on a tree. Then we heard the tree fall, the very last truffula tree of them all. No more trees, no more seeds, no more work to be done.  They jumped into my cars and drove away under the smog, smuggled snot, stars. The Lorax said nothing, just gave me a glance and gave me a very sad, sad backward glance. And he lifted himself by the seat of his pants. I'll never forget the grim look on his face when he histed himself and took leave of this place through a hole in the smog without leaving a trace. So you're in charge of the last one of the truffula seeds, the truffula trees that everyone needs. Plant a new truffula, treat it with care. Give it clean water and feed it fresh air. Grow a forest, protect it from axes that hack. Then the Lorax and all of his friends may come back. Thank you for listening. You can now leave to go to your classes. I believe in being a global citizen, a person invested in the politics of their community and country, but also the politics of people worldwide. I think that understanding and combating international injustices, which might not affect me directly, but affect the world as a whole, should be a primary goal for every human. I believe saying you aren't a political person shows privilege and ignorance because it means you believe that the politics of today don't affect you personally.  As a human, I believe that I have an innate responsibility to care for the people who don't get to choose whether or not they are involved with politics. I believe in caring. I believe the betterment of humanity is worth the time and effort. My generation cannot be passive because too much action is needed for the adults of tomorrow to sit back and wallow in fear of the problems that we have been handed. I think that any form of diversity within a community or society should be not just respected, but valued because the diversity of ideas is crucial if we are going to provoke change within society.  They will be created by the children of today. Those who are curious about problems that affect their world and are willing to combat them with creativity and a loving soul. With this mindset, I have no choice but to believe in the power of helping. I also believe in doing what makes you happy because seeing happiness in the eyes of people you care about is one of the best feelings anyone can have. It inspires you to do more good in the world. I can only hope my generation will be one that spreads happiness like wildfire and that we do what we can to let everyone experience the true joy of living. I believe this joy gives people a reason to live, a reason to learn, and a reason to improve themselves and the community around them. Smiles do not need to be translated. Smiles are global. Because of this, I believe in the spread of happiness worldwide. I warn you, because I also believe that being happy all the time isn't worth your effort. People that are happy with the world around them will never see the problems, which results in ignorance and incompetence. Being a global citizen means you need to be frustrated with the world, but carry your self-worth and well-being above the mistakes that you or other people have made. My goal is to spark joy in people that want to change the way our world works. This means being aware of problems, but being open-minded and positive when thinking about possible solutions. I believe in being inspired, but also in inspiring. I am not set in these beliefs, but I do hope that they will inspire the next part of my life. I am on a journey which I have only just begun, and staying still in that journey is not worth my time. So most importantly, I believe in change. Slowly, as people are struggling, I have tears to tear in my crisis. If someone wants to speak into you, it turns out I don't like to speak when we're all against the very things that happened in the first place. They disagree with many words on China's constitution and the very foundation of a free country. We must fight if they don't feel that the freedom is there. We must fight if we want to ensure freedom for generations to come. I believe in freedom. So, oh, it's feeding back. Okay, is it okay? Okay. I would like to start my belief statement by asking everyone to close their eyes. Now, picture an apple in your mind. Is your apple red or is it green? Is the apple pink? Is it yellow? Maybe it's multiple colors like a honeycress or a courtland. Can you turn the apple in your head? 90 degrees, 180 degrees, 360 degrees. Is your apple just floating in space or is it in a bowl with other fruit? If it is in a bowl with other fruit, what other fruit is there? Or maybe it's not in a bowl and it's in your hand or someone else's hand.  Okay, you can put your hands down and now rate the clearness of your apple using your hands from zero to 10. And if you didn't raise your hand and you can't rate your clearness, I'm sorry if my belief statement is about to scar you for life. I don't hold me accountable. But now as a creative person, you might think that I'd be around like seven to, that's eight, seven to 10 or at least in the upper half. I wish I could be a 10. I'd take an eight. I'd even take a one because I don't see anything. My mind is blank and I'm at zero. Earlier in the year around mid to late October while I was in Florida, I watched a video titled, I have a fantasia and you may too, without realizing it.  The realization that my completely blank mind was not normal was or shattering. I always thought, well, no one can actually see their own personal beach in that guided meditation or daydreaming is just a figure of speech or going to your happy place just means feeling warm and happy inside. But I found out through this YouTube video that I had something wrong with my brain and that left me feeling empty and isolated like I was missing out on something huge. And suddenly I came to the realization that if I had lost a loved one that I didn't have any pictures of, I could never see them again. So I started obsessively taking pictures of everything and everyone that was important to me in my life. And then I lost my phone in a snow bank and all of the precious pictures I had taken. Yet even if I hadn't lost them, I would still have that feeling of emptiness inside of me. I believe in the power of sight because as soon as an object is out of my field of vision I can't see it anymore. And I think that some people who can take it for granted sometimes. I can't see that apple from before. I can't see settings or characters of books in my mind. I can't plan out school or art projects in my head. I cannot count sheep to fall asleep. I can't do mental math in my head and I can no longer see my great-grandmother. The absence of my mind's eye has shaped my life because even though I cannot do any of those things I have come to realize that I can still be happy and live life through myself instead of through a camera. And I need to remember that more often. Thank you. My name is Molly and this is my belief statement. I love writing so much. I mean, I was smiling when I wrote this at home and I guess you could say it's my thing. However, this belief statement was kind of brutal to write. I've written probably a book's worth of nonsense at this point but all of that nonsense made its way back to two important ideas, hope and the world. Parts of the world are not doing so good as a result of climate change and habitat destruction. We, the whole entire world, have the next decade and a year to change that. The next 11 years matter a tremendous amount and that scares me. It's a nice motivational scare, though. It keeps me productive. People live for about a day in comparison to the life of the universe. Looking back on my life thus far, sure, there are things I'd like to change but it reminds me what should I do and how should I live my universe today? This question humbles me and I don't know if it's a question I'll ever be able to answer but I do know this. When I wake up in the morning, I hear the birds and I see the sun. When I go to bed, I can see stars and hear crickets in the summer. Throughout my whole life, I'm going to work on savoring that, remembering every color and sound from those bright mornings and starry nights. I too often take that for granted. For the last couple of years, I've gone to Madeleine Island in the summer with some of my favorite people. That little island brings me so much energy and joy and motivation to help the world. It's not one of those tourist towns that only peaks in the summer. You can tell it's breathtaking year round. When me and my friends go there, we sit around the campfire and talk for hours. We swim in the freezing blue lake and we bike into town and get ice cream. Sometimes we're lucky enough to watch shooting stars dapple the dark sky. The only reason we can do that is because of the Earth. I'm so grateful for that and I know I owe the Earth a first class future. I believe having hope that we can make change is not only important but necessary. It's hard for people and definitely me to keep a positive perspective when the news is hounding us with hateful things. From my observation, hope can do a really wild thing where it empowers people and people make change. I hope my generation is up for the task to spread love and make change because the now is now and now is when change can begin. This I believe. Thank you. This is Jonathan Schluyfer and this is my faith statement or spoken word performance. I'm sorry if I yell at you. I'm not mad, don't worry, we're good here, it's all good. All right. I believe in words, the power to destroy the Earth and to fix it up again. I believe that sticks and stones will break my bones but words will always hurt me. They'll stab you in the back and let you bleed out in the cold, hard ground. Yet they can be so beautiful, almost like a butterfly flying around a meadow. I believe that words have so much power within them, yet can be so useless and so meaningless, almost like a plastic bread clip. Furthermore, going to what I believe in, I believe that you and I are a grain of sand. No, I'm serious. No jokes, no games.  This, so small the universe won't even notice it. Gone in a blink, a flash. A quick blink for the universe, that's all you are. A sip of its morning coffee. We are simply sand. Simply waiting for the next wave to wash us away. No, no, I won't let myself become this again. I'm not, never.  This grain of sand will make a change. This grain of sand won't be taken by the next wave and this grain of sand will live to the fullest.  I believe in nothing. I believe in the voids between stars, in the vacuums, powerful enough to bend steel, and in the darkness, even if it isn't a true nothingness. I believe in mysteries and unanswered questions. What is in the spaces between atoms, between electrons, between particles? What is dark matter? How can electrical pulses create entire worlds in some people's minds? And why are we like this? In 2017, my eighth grade year, I tried to play volleyball, emphasis on tried. The third practice in, I took a spike to the head. Big surprise, the next day, I was sent home with a diagnosis of a concussion. For the next two weeks, I wasn't quite bedridden, but I was stuck in my room. And it was dark. I started to hate the fact that I wasn't allowed to do anything. Which is why when I slipped and hit my head in 2018, I wasn't just crying from the pain of having hit my head. I was angry. I was not about to get another concussion. But I can't really control that. And so another two weeks stuck in my room. Sure, I could go talk to my mom or go get the cat. But I wasn't allowed to do anything. But instead of being angry, I started to appreciate it. I had started a high school. And there were, during that time I had a concussion, I didn't have to do anything. We get so caught up in things that we need to do, that we want to do, that we have to do, that sometimes it's nicer to just sit back. Without space in between you and me, you can't see me. We'd be crushed up together. There wouldn't be enough room in you for your blood to get through to your organs. None of us would exist without space. Everybody tries so hard to make things, to get things, to make things go to understand, I'm definitely guilty of that myself. I want to know so much, I want to learn everything, but there has to be an unknown, which is why I believe in nothing, in undefinable voids, in the timeless vacuum of space, and in the dark. So what are the top three things that I value most in my life? One is music, if you saw earlier. Music has the biggest presence in my life, and it is one of the very few things that makes me truly happy. It's a happy where I can, where nothing else matters, if you know what I'm talking about. And I put a little note in here, I was listening to music as I wrote this belief statement. I can lose myself in music for hours. It's everywhere in my life. The second thing that I value most is friends. I'm a very social person, and I like to do things with people, and I do everything with my friends. And crazy enough, one of the biggest friend groups of mine has to do with band, and more specifically, percussion. And look at that, there's music. Also, one of my other biggest friend groups is Boy Scouts. In Boy Scouts, half of our outings consist of us either blaring music over very loud speakers in the back of our Boy Scout bus, or maybe shouting the words to one of the 10 to 15 songs we know by heart. Or we could be making a beat with our mouths, with our hands, with our heads, or with other people that doesn't matter, as long as there's music to sing along to. But there's music there too. There are also the friends that have gotten me through school. And some of those friends are here in the COA class, which are Hayden and Torin. Hayden and I always used to hang out and make crazy games in our imaginations. They were so intricate that I can't believe I was able to understand them. We would make characters, and then we'd battle, and it was a good time. Torin shares my love of music with me, and we used to both do saxophone for two years, and then I switched over to percussion. And then finally this year, he switched over to percussion with me. And I'm a big drumline boy, and he's trying out for drumlines, so I hope he gets onto that. The third thing I value most is family. Now I'm not just saying this to be cheesy or anything, but how can I not value them? I live with them. They are there in my life every day, almost every day, unless I'm a Boy Scout or a sleepover. They make me food and they give me a place to sleep. My mom is one of the more music-oriented people in my family. We can have jam sessions almost anywhere we go, and half the time I don't even mean for them to happen. They kind of just come out of nowhere. Like, we'll be driving down a road, and I'll just turn on the radio, and we'll just crank it all the way up, and we'll start listening to music, and then we'll start singing along, and it's great. She's also the more loud and rambunctious one, and let's just say she's not afraid to make a scene, which it's okay with me, I like to do that too, but it's a little embarrassing sometimes. Now, all this being said, it's not like my dad and I don't have a good time. My dad and I can listen to music and enjoy stuff. It's usually Johnny Cash or William Nelson. My dad is a more quiet and understated guy, but if you listen, he can always interject a funny comment into the conversation you guys are having, which is always great. My dad is also one of the, is the person who's more involved in Boy Scouts with me. He's been on a lot of my Boy Scout outings, and a little background. He's actually in Eagle Scout himself, and he was the first one in his troop, so he knows a little bit about it. And he's also the one who's pushing me along. He's nudging me and yelling at me to do everything, to get everything done. Now, I wanted to put yelling in there for two reasons. One, because he's a quiet man, it's kind of scary when he yells at you, because it's right out of the blue, and it's like really startling, but it's kind of funny afterwards. And two, because yelling is probably the most effective way to get me to do something. Now, friends are also, I've got a lot of friends that I also consider family, since I don't have any siblings. I know a lot of my good friends are like family to me. And with all this being said, I can say that I believe in music, friends, and family. So, thank you. And now, I now invite you to enter the giving and receiving of today's offering. Today's offering will go towards the continued support for our coming of age program. Thank you. Do you ever wonder why so many people like music? It's simple, really. Hearing a good or familiar song leases chemicals in the brain that make you feel good. I believe music is very important to every one of us. It consists of our personal interests and allows us to express ourselves. Music is special to me because there are so many different ways you can experience it, through various instruments, genres of music, and the way different cultures use the music to tell stories. When I was in fifth grade, I switched from the violin that I learned to play the year prior to the saxophone. I liked orchestra and had a fun time with that new experience, but when I saw the different band instruments, I was instantly hooked. What made my four years in band so much better was my teachers, each having their own way of teaching and conducting, which I thought was so cool. In my last year at Cromery Middle School, I saw more uniqueness and percussion. I started taking lessons this past summer and signed up for marching band. For three months, there was non-stop work, focus, and performing on a field, and it was one of the best times of my life. It was so great because you're surrounding yourselves with people who, like me, like music enough to march it in the heater cold. When school began this year, I signed up for percussion in my band class. Learning something brand new is like a reset. I just need to learn not to stomp my feet, it's a bad habit, and after seeing upperclassmen percussionists play for a marching band, I've set a goal to practice and perfect my drumming so that I'll be selected to be on the drum line next year. I believe music helps you be part of something larger than yourself. Playing a piece together connects me to other people as we play the same song with different instruments. We learn from what we're playing, we work together, we create something unique. I develop a sense of pride for myself and my fellow musicians as we practice and perform. We all want to be part of something bigger. We all want to belong. Music is a catalyst for those connections to occur. Music gives me joy. High energy music wakes me up and gets me excited. Music connects me with my deeper feelings, sometimes feelings of sadness and heartache. It helps me connect to my emotions, it supports me, it comforts me, and I believe we must connect with our emotions and let them breathe. Music helped me get there. Music can connect us with our everyday life from the sports we play, from our past, present, and future. It is all around us. An Athenian philosopher named Plato from ancient Greece once said, music gives a soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, and life to everything. I interpret this to mean that music is something that everyone has within them. Music can be considered a guide for the journey ahead. Music connects us to everything we know, this I believe. My parents always had National Geographic magazines with headlines about how our world was changing, lying around. Though I never had the patience to read the articles, I would flip through the pages and look at all the pitiful looking animals and ecosystems under attack from humans. From a young age, I already knew our world had troubles. During summers, waiting at the edge of the lake by my house, I could always be found nagging my friends to stop throwing sticks into the water. My parents had told me that throwing sticks and leaves into the water makes the lake even sicker and smell even worse. Now, I'm able to understand that the phosphorus and nitrogen in those small objects feed the algae in the lake, which continues to pollute it. Recently, the problems with pollution in the ocean have been drawing my attention away from our small lakes. As of 2015, approximately 12.7 million tons of plastic were in the oceans, which as you can imagine is hugely dangerous for all marine life. When plastic ends up in the ocean, it breaks apart into microscopic pieces less than five millimeters long. According to the National History Museum, these tiny pieces of plastic are polluting areas of the ocean that humans haven't touched yet. The Seventh Unitarian Universalist Principle encourages respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part, meaning we should be stewards to the Earth. I believe that as humans, it is our job to do more than to respect our world, but to also take care of it. With unsealable plastic floating in unsealable parts of the oceans, it might seem like there is nothing we can do, but there is. There are organizations such as the River Alliance of Wisconsin and the Alliance for the Great Lakes that are focusing on cleaning out and preserving our local lakes. There are also organizations such as the Ocean River Institute and the Oceana Organization that are working to clean out our oceans and preserve the wildlife living there. As I think about these issues, I hope for more people to become involved with the solution, so go check out those organizations in the program I have a long life ahead of me and I hope that kayaking around with friends on clean water and running across plastic-free beaches with family will always be an option. I'm Eva. I believe in friendship and experiencing life alongside other people. During my hours alone in the woods, I had had the intention of finishing and polishing a draft for a previous belief statement. While enjoying the beauty of the world around me, my old ideas didn't seem worthy of taking up any of that time. What I did end up doing, however, was write a list of all the people I love. I wanted to share my peace with them, even if only in this small way. Having experiences of your own is important, but energy seems to intensify when shared. Telling others about your experiences, allowing them to understand you deeper or be happy for you, I find that vital. If our lives are paintings, our actions are the paintbrush and the people we meet along the way are the colors.  I'd leech off my brother for friends before making my own. Once I did make my own, I stuck with them, making more as I traveled through elementary school. By fourth grade, we had a solid group formed. Imaginative teal, royal purple, sky blue and forest green, maroon and magenta drifting in and out for a while. We have grown up together since then. Some have grown apart, others have moved away, leaving the three of us, green and blue and purple, three coplanar personalities, loyal and supportive and dependable. Over the past two years, all of our lives have changed wildly. My household shifted from four members to three members to two. My friends have watched as their siblings have shifted into adult life. We have all become busier and older and more complex, adding new ideas and personality traits and hobbies on what seems like a daily basis. All of us have met and gotten close to new people. We have each individually become more opaque. And yet, there we are in the midst of all this change at the corner at the end of the e-wing, every day eating lunch, constant and stable and safe. We haven't needed to stay the same in order to continue being friends. We have kept our relationship fluid, listening to the changes that have been needed but fighting for what is good. The piece of artwork created by our three colors mixed is greater than what they are alone. The combination is greater than the sum of its parts. Just like how mixing red and blue makes a new, even better color. I have loved getting to know more people, adventurous pastels and trustworthy jewel tones. I look forward to seeing them. Snapchatting them gets me through bee days. I know that they understand me, know that I understand them. It's all love and memories and laughter. I text long stories back and forth with the friends I've made at summer camp. I glide easily through summer days with warm-toned, easy-going gals. Laughter bubbles in the wings backstage with a cool-toned stage crew. Big, huge love is shared with the precious rainbow of the stack we have here. It has never seemed to matter the place, the canvas, if you will, where these times have occurred. Which shades of paint are swirling together has always been much more important. I believe in friends. All of the friends I have had over the years. Those who imagined entirely new worlds with me in my backyard and elementary school.  And those who I've met only recently. Those who have shared their rants and listened to mine. Those tagged in my Instagram pictures and those who are only present in memories. Their marks forever made on my childhood. The reds, the blues, and the yellows. I look forward to making new friends and keeping the old, dabbling into new colors on the palette of my identity along the way. I don't want the canvas of my life to only be sky blue. It is much more valuable to me to have the colors of other people involved in almost every stroke. Thank you. What a joy it is to be celebrating another coming-of-age ceremony and the culmination of another coming-of-age year. This is truly a moment to stop and give gratitude for our youth, for the gift of their insights and their wisdom, and to recognize that their classroom learning here at First Unitarian Society may be over, but their journey of lifelong learning on their own has just begun. Throughout this year, they have begun in earnest to study themselves, to get to know themselves, examining their beliefs and values, ideals, and aspirations. With their statements, our youth have given us a glimpse of where this process has led them so far, and we'd pause for a moment to thank those who've walked with them on this journey. We'll begin with those in our community who served as the adult facilitators. They have given these youth direction, insight, wisdom, and guidance throughout the past year. They have brought patience, good humor, and much love and compassion. So Susan Koenig, Grant Abird, and Scott Mason. We also pause to thank our elders. Each youth is matched with an elder from the congregation, people who are carefully chosen to embody the thoughtfulness, kindness, and commitment. We hope to encourage in our youth. Throughout this year, our elders were steadfast and took their challenge cheerfully and joyfully. We owe much thanks to this group as well. Anne Fleming, John Grady, Jacob Hahn, Laurie Duzan, and Meg Parker. And if our youth will now come to the front of the auditorium. To all those who are gathered here today, we ask that you remember that your important role in the spiritual and moral development of these youth is essential. Where they journey from here is not entirely up to them. It is also up to you, all of us. We must remember that deepening their experience of unitarian universalism is not the responsibility of their parents and advisors alone. Helping them to blossom as loving and conscientious human beings is a responsibility that we all share. And now that they have completed their coming of age year, that responsibility becomes more relevant and more immediate. For these young people, you can serve as both example and inspiration of how people live out in everyday life, their spiritual values. Through you, they can observe unitarian universalist faith in action. There can be no greater or more effective teaching than your good example. In that spirit, will you continue to encourage the spiritual growth of these youth you see before you? Will you value their insight and emerging convictions and recognize the gifts and talents that they bring to our community and the enthusiasm and hope that they bring to our world? If so, please say we will. We will. Now to the youth. To all of you, we recognize today the work that you have done this past year and we are grateful for the gifts and talents you have brought to us in your time here at this society. Will you continue this journey you have begun to grow as an individual, expressing your beliefs, growing in faith, and continuing to question and explore? If so, please say we will. We will. At this time, I would like to ask the parents of our coming-of-age youth to stand and join with your children in the response of reading that you have with you. And our parents begin. To remember, shelter to sleep. Our job with you has been to stretch our relations, your boundaries, and your beliefs to accept our inevitable growth even to now. It's been a tremendous journey. Our jobs are changing. We need a technologist and we will grow to accept that. What with you will become more master of the middle class? What with you will lead to live out and be responsible growing into the kind of our own experiences? Thank you. Please be seated. At the dedication of a child we give to each a rosebud, fragrant symbol of beauty, promise, and love. The rose we give then has no thorns. Symbolizing the better world we would like to give to our children. We hope that these children whom we have dedicated will learn to recognize the beauty and the goodness which exists that they'll grow in wisdom and compassion adding their own beauty to the world. Today we give to each of these young people a rose in full bloom. Symbolizing the beauty and the gifts they already give to our world and the natural beauty found in each one of them. Yet this time the thorns are still intact. When you were a child we could do our best to shield you from the harshness and the cruelty of the world. But now as a young adult we can no longer protect you from all that you encounter both the beauty and the cruelty. But no matter where you may go and how far you may travel you will always be with us in spirit and we will always be sending blessings your way. So accept these roses knowing that there are harsh realities in this world but there is much beauty as well. May you choose to see the beauty whenever possible. And now as we do when you were young children we ask that you be granted clarity of thought integrity of speech and a compassionate heart. May the blessings of an understanding heart strength integrity of purpose love received and given be yours today and remain with you as you go forward into ever fuller life. If you will join me in congratulating our coming of age youth. And we invite you now to rise in all the ways we do for our closing hymn number 108. Hold on to what is good even if it is a handful of earth. Hold on to what you believe even if it is a tree which stands by itself. Hold on to what you must do even if it is a long way from here. Hold on to my hand even when I have gone away from you. Please be seated for one more gift of music.


So to introduce myself, my name is Anik, I have worked at the Brain Foundation for three years and I'll be your host tonight. I am the grants program manager and digital lead, which means that I oversee the grant application process and coordinate with our scientific advisory committee to get all the research grant applications marked. I also write a lot of the content for the Brain Foundation and our division Migraine Headache Australia. We also have Carl Sinanato moderating tonight, so you will see him in the chat as moderator Brain Foundation. So for those of you who are new or who don't know much about the Brain Foundation, here's just a bit about what we do. Our mission here is threefold. So our primary goal is to fund the highest quality Australian research into brain diseases, disorders and injuries. And this research can help improve diagnoses, treatments and patient outcomes overall. And the Brain Foundation was actually established in 1970, so we've been doing this for 53 years now. Secondly, we provide medically reviewed resources about brain conditions that anyone can use to learn about a particular disorder. This includes articles on our website and also content like this webinar or the videos that we'll be releasing throughout Brain Awareness Week. Lastly, we raise awareness about the impact of brain diseases and advocate for patients. And this is a really important part of our mission and one of the reasons that Brain Awareness Week exists, because without people being aware of the impact of brain diseases on Australians, their loved ones, the medical system, it's really hard to get support for research and that exists at both the general public and also importantly at a government level as well. So advocacy is a really important part of what we do. So just make sure that everyone's in the right place. Who is this webinar for? If you are interested in learning about how to improve your brain health, if you want to understand more about dementia and also if you want to ask questions to a brain researcher about the link between health, lifestyle factors and dementia, or any other questions about brain health and the aging brain as well. So I'd like to introduce our speaker for tonight who is Associate Professor Greg Sutherland. Greg is the director of the New South Wales Brain Tissue Resource Centre and an Associate Professor of Pathology at the University of Sydney.  And this is a really important part of medical research and helps enable a lot of really groundbreaking research projects. Greg also leads the Brain and Body Research Node, which aims to understand the relationship between the brain and systemic chronic disorders. So that includes things like obesity and diabetes. And so basically they work to understand how whole body health and brain health affect each other. Greg's research interests include neuropathology, which is the study of diseases affecting the nervous system, transcriptomics, which is the study of DNA and the genetic epidemiology of neurodegenerative diseases. So epidemiology is the study of how often diseases occur in different groups of people and also why those people get those diseases. So without any further ado, let's start the webinar. Hello. Welcome to a talk on brain health and aging as part of Brain Awareness Week in 2023. My name is Greg Sutherland. I'm Associate Professor of Neuropathology at the University of Sydney. And I work in this building here, the Charles Perkins Centre. What we're going to talk about today is brain health, what it means. And particularly the relationship of healthy brain aging and how that is distinguished from dementia, which is the common form of disease that we see associated with brain. I'd also like to talk a little bit about busting some myths about what might and might not cause dementia.  I'm sure you'll agree that there's a lot of conflicting information out there about how you can defy the odds and have a healthy brain right up to the end of your life and in particular avoid things like dementia. This is some stories taken from Neuroscience News website. There's a couple of suggestions. One of them is sleep medications, the likes of still knocks and Christian Charles with dementia. And over here we've got one talking about oral health and how that might contribute to dementia. As it turns out, neither of these suggestions is a major factor, at least in my opinion on what causes dementia. But they're both quite interesting things to follow up because they may give us clues about what are important mechanisms because they have some sort of modified effect on those mechanisms.  Our brain is immense and particularly one part of our brain called the forebrain. You look down here at our friend, the mouse is used in the majority of animal model experiments that we do in medical research. They've got a very small frontal lobe whereas it's large in humans. It's so large that it needs to be folded up on itself. And you can see these folds here. This is a fixed brain taken from someone after death. And these folds are called gyrie and are separated by these spaces. It just allows a lot more brain for the amount of space. And average size of the human brain is about one and a half kgs compared with, say, a sheep brain. You're looking at 400 grams or only a quarter of the size and all the way down to a tenth of that size of fully milligrams for a mouse brain. Within the brain, at a microscopic level, there's a number of different brain cells. The ones we typically will hear about are the neurons and these are the ones we often concentrate on when we think about diseases. But there are a lot of other cells, oligodendrocytes, for example. They have the myelin within them that is responsible for insulating axons or neurites or parts of the neuron where information travels up and down and they allow that to travel faster. Astrocytes are supporting cells and they do a lot of mopping up of neurochemicals and getting them back to the neurons. But have a lot of other roles that some of them we don't quite understand. And there's also these cells called microglia. These are immune cells or the brain's resident immune cells. And as we'll see with dementia, a lot of the gene variants that have been associated with dementia are actually the protein products of those genes are expressed in microglia. So the biology of microglia is becoming more and more central to understanding dementia and Alzheimer's disease. And it's something that my lab works on. Now, in the preceding schematic, we were able to see a lot of space around these cells in the brain, but that is purely a schematic. In reality, the processes of cells like neurons and blue, oligodendrocytes in red and astrocytes in red and also microglia and green, their processes are not only tightly woven within each other, but also communicating. And so that space between the cells or that open space between the cells in reality doesn't exist. It's just this bird's nest of processes within the human brain. And on the right hand side, in red, we have something that occurs in Alzheimer's disease brains called plaques. And when you throw in pathology into the mix and the situation becomes even more complex. In green here, we're looking at those immune cells of the brain called microglia. You notice they've got quite a distinct shape to what's shown over on the left. They're reacting to this particular plaque in a quite sort of chaotic fashion. And it's this type of scenario that a lot of my research is focused on trying to understand how and why cells respond and whether we can either, if it's good response, augment it or if it's a bad response, try and stop it or slow it down. So what is brain health?  Brain health can sometimes be just thought of as whole body health. We're starting to understand that many diseases that we thought were just associated with the brain had a whole body aspect to them. Although there are other diseases that seem to just affect the brain. So brain health is really a situation where you would avoid the causes of an unhealthy brain. If you can't avoid them, we would talk about factors being modifiable. But there's other factors that you can't avoid, like your own genetics. But some examples of causes of brain disease that you might be able to avoid or include infectious causes. This is a disease called Croats of Yakob disease. It would be quite difficult to avoid that. Evenologically, similarly, a disease called multiple sclerosis, cells, lymphocytes, cross into the brain and cause problems with the white matter. Vascular, we're going to talk a little bit about today. It's also known as Strokes. Traumatic, head injuries or repetitive head injuries. Neoplastic gliomas, major problem for the cancer world because the success rate of treating gliomas has not improved over a number of years. Metabolic toxic, alcohol being the most commonly used and abused drug. Something that my lab also works on. Alcohol affects the brain. Degenerative, the dementias that we're going to talk about today. Notice that this is the same disease, multiple sclerosis, as the immunological group. But what happens in multiple sclerosis, as I said, is lymphocytes cross the brain and start attacking the white matter or demyelination. So multiple sclerosis fits both of those categories. Of the leading causes of death in Australia, two out of four actually affect the brain, dementia including Alzheimer's disease and cerebrovascular disease or stroke. Currently heart disease for men and women from when statistics began in the earlier 20th century has always been the number one killer in Australia and most Western countries. But in the last set of statistics in 2020 was the first time at least for females where currently heart disease was displaced from the top category and replaced by dementia. And for most of you, and for me this came as a surprise because we usually think of dementia as just affecting the aged population and maybe not being that common. But as it turns out with an increasingly older population in Australia and most countries in the world, dementia is almost reaching epidemic proportions. These statistics might change a little bit in the next iteration because of COVID, but in general brain diseases, chronic brain diseases, dementia and stroke or cerebrovascular disease are two of the biggest causes of death in Australia. The risk factors for stroke and the risk factors for dementia overlap to some degree. Both of them share the major risk factor as aging. And as I just said, we have an aging population so both of these diseases are on the increase. Other factors that cause or increase your chances of having a stroke are very much the same as what increases your chances of coronary artery disease or coronary heart disease or just heart disease because their etiology or what causes the disease is common between both of these types of problems. In fact, things like buildup of fatty streaks or what we call atherosclerosis in your blood vessels. And so cigarette smoking or high cholesterol levels or uncontrolled blood, high blood pressure are both problematic for heart disease and also for stroke. And I'll point out here also that some of those same associations exist for dementia and particularly Alzheimer's disease and age is again the major factor for Alzheimer's disease. Now, why I've talked about probable associations here is that the one aspect of the evidence for these cardiovascular factors is pretty strong. But it also is because there is a reasonably high percentage of Alzheimer's disease cases that also have vascular problems which probably add collectively to people becoming demented or losing their cognitive abilities. The other thing I wanted to quickly point out on the risk factors for AD is that your genetics and particularly a type of gene variant in a protein called Apolypo protein E, the E4 variant of that gene is a major, the second major problem or the second major cause of Alzheimer's disease after aging. So someone who's old and has two copies of this particular gene and therefore two copies of the protein, they are at a much higher risk of developing Alzheimer's disease in their lifetime than people who don't have this particular gene variant. I'll return to that subject a little bit later. There's a lot of research that's been happening in brain aging. There seems to be different aging processes going on in different organs whether it's your skin or your gut or your liver or in fact your brain. They seem to all age at a different speed, but also within individuals. Organs and individuals age at different rates and you would be familiar with this idea of biological aging versus chronological aging. Some people have been appearing biologically younger than their chronological age and there seems to be some evidence that that is indeed the case. And some people's brains look older than would be expected. And this is mostly associated with some of those risk factors like smoking and cardiovascular risk factors I talked about before and the evidence shown by these particular researchers. We know with aging that there are a lot of changes within the brain including within the blood vessels. And we also know that the brain gets smaller or loses volume, atrophies with aging. That happens in both males and females at about the same rate. And we also know and opposite to what was originally thought that we age because we lose neurons or those cells that send signals between them when we think or when we want to make a movement or feel something via touch or one of our other senses. Rather than it being loss of neurons, it actually appears to be loss of white matter that insulating material or myelin that we talked about a little bit earlier. When it comes to neurons, some of the neurons seem to shrink but we don't lose many neurons with aging. Yet the combination of that white matter loss with neurons is enough to give us some degree of cognitive decline as we age. I'm mentioning aging because when it comes to dementia, this as you might have already thought from my previous comments is the rate of or the prevalence of dementia at different ages goes out quite rapidly. So it's very unusual for people under 60 years of age to get dementia. But by the time people are 85 years of age and the average longevity for both men and women or combined in Australia is currently around about 82 or 83, the time people reach 85 years of age about 25% of that age group over 85 will develop dementia. So that's getting to quite a high level. Why do sometimes we use the term dementia and other times use the term Alzheimer's disease? Alzheimer's disease is a type of dementia but it's also the most common type. There's various statistics out there but probably about 60 to 70% of all dementia are Alzheimer's disease or at least mainly Alzheimer's disease. Because if you look down here, you'll notice also that there's a mixed type of dementia where there's a combination of what we typically see in Alzheimer's disease but also with vascular damage. And as I mentioned earlier, some of the reasons why having good vascular health and avoiding things like uncontrolled high blood pressure is because and it can prevent dementia because it mainly has the effect on this vascular component of the disease. It may be some lesser effects on Alzheimer's disease but it probably is mainly through keeping your cerebral vasculature very healthy. These are the hallmark pathologies of AED that we see if we look down the microscope in someone who has demented during their life and died of Alzheimer's disease. We only come to the conclusion that had Alzheimer's disease by looking at these entities at post-mortem. And what we're looking at here is plaques which are made up of a substance, a sticky substance called beta amyloid, tangles which are equally made up of the sticky substance but this time it's a substance called a protein called tau. And then these two things can sometimes come together either with tangles and plaques and sometimes also tangles right within the plaques. When an individual comes through to post-mortem and we see large amounts of these, then they are declared to have Alzheimer's disease. But an important point is that it's not people not only people with Alzheimer's disease that develop plaques and tangles. As we age, the majority of us will develop plaques and almost all of us will develop tangles. So there's a real difficulty here in distinguishing the effects of natural aging and the effects of Alzheimer's disease and that makes our usual experimental paradigm of cases versus controls to try to understand what are the factors affecting the diseased community as opposed to people who don't develop dementia. It makes it extremely hard.  So why does that happen to certain people? Well, we actually do not know. I talked about this genetic variant called apolipoprotein E. There's also other genes that we know and some of those genes, their proteins are expressed in microglia. Diabetes has a small amount of effect. So does being a female. But the biggest effect on whether you develop Alzheimer's disease is whether you live to a ripe old age. So aging is very inherent to why people develop the disease. There's some large gene effects. There's some protective effects like being highly educated or being a male. But in general, there's a lot of factors that we still don't understand. Some of the myths around what will cause dementia arise not so much as myths, but some small studies, and they often are small studies where someone comes up with an idea that a particular habit might increase your risk for Alzheimer's disease. In this case, it's slightly tongue-in-cheek with nose-picking.  It's separated at one stage by quite a thin bony plate, which has actually got many holes in it to allow your olfactory nerves to travel through. But that's very close to the brain. And the thought being, is it possible that some bacteria can get across and into the brain and cause Alzheimer's disease and what some other diseases like Parkinson's disease. This is known as the infectious hypothesis for Alzheimer's disease. It's been around in various forms over a long period of time. It may have some... It may modify your risk slightly, but it's probably not the major reason why someone gets Alzheimer's disease or other forms of dementia. We recently took advantage of a massive new study that's in the UK. It's called the UK Biobank, where they took 500,000 people and measured everything they possibly could on these people, including doing a lot of survey data. They checked their cognitive function. They imaged them in MRI scanners. And with all of that information and with a few people, because these are aged individuals, having already converted to AD, we tried to work out what was the difference between people who had dementia and people who hadn't. And when we matched them for aging, so took aging out of the equation, the only real thing that we could find or only major effect was the apolipoprotein E4, which we already knew about. There were a few other genetic effects, interestingly, very close to apoE4 in our DNA. That also had a bit of a major effect, but from there, and the red is risk and blue is protective from there, all the others had very, very small effects. And so we weren't really able to find any smoking gun or want of a better word from this particular study. There were some interesting things, the protective effect of insomnia that is quite a controversial thing, but also we saw some liver enzymes that seemed to be increased or at least a ratio of increased could be problematic. Again, this is this idea that maybe some of these brain only or what we think of brain only diseases do affect other organs in the body. And there is something called the brain, liver, gut, microbiome axis that might be consistent with this idea that liver is involved in some of these neurodegenerative diseases. What about alcohol? Is that a risk factor for dementia? Well, heavy consumption of alcohol throughout your life, and I mean very heavy, like 100 grams a day, which would be equivalent to sort of eight cans of beer or more than a bottle of wine. That can be problematic. It would be also problematic for every other organ in your body. But in general, if you're a light drinker of alcohol, it seems to have what we call a J-curve effect on most of the organs in the body. We're a little bit of alcohol compared with people who are staying completely at the positive effect on your cognition. But once you start drinking a lot more, then things go in the opposite direction. There's a condition that we also study called alcohol-related brain damage and people develop cognitive dysfunction. Some other people call it alcoholic dementia. But whether alcohol increases your risk for Alzheimer's disease, if it does, it's probably only has a small effect. So in general, alcohol is not a big problem for dementia per se. But drinking lots of alcohol is problematic for just about every other organ in your body, including your brain, but not directly related to Alzheimer's disease. So what is on the horizon for a cure or a treatment for Alzheimer's disease? Well, interestingly, some types of drugs called amyloid-modifying drugs based on antibodies would bind to and seemingly remove amyloid from the brain. They have been recently in 2020 and again just at the end of last year, these two drugs have now been approved by the FDA to be used in patients. It's a very controversial decision because even though we can see from imaging or a type of imaging called PET imaging that these people lose their amyloid in their brain, both drugs have only resulted in modest improvements in cognitive decline. Both drugs are very expensive, and so a lot of neurologists are loathed to put people on these very expensive drugs if they're not going to have much improvement on their cognition. I think most people would agree whether they're in the amyloid-modifying drug camp or not that adjunctive treatments are required and to have new treatments, unique, new targets. And this is the type of stuff that my lab works on. So how do we go about doing that? Well, very quickly, we're using two techniques that have been developed over the last couple of years. One's called single-cell studies where we isolate cells from people with the disease and people without it dissociating out their brain tissue after their death and then working out whether the cells and people with the disease or not are expressing the same type of proteins. And what we found with this work among others too is that there are actually lots of different types of oligodendrocytes or different types of astrocytes. And the size of the clusters and all the existence of some of these sub-clusters of these different brain cells are different whether you've got the disease or you haven't got the disease. And so what we think happens is that the brain cell type change in people with the particular disease and by looking at those patterns we think we can find new targets for new therapies. A technique that's very similar to that is called spatial transcriptomics. But this time, rather than breaking the brain up to get the information in terms of single-cells we leave the brain tissue as it is, photograph it and then do the transcriptomics so then we can relate what's happening in terms of gene expression directly to what's happening in the tissue including whether there is pathology in that tissue or not. These are some mouse tissue samples that are not human but it gives you an idea of this new approach and this is something that we're really excited about because I think this is going to be revolutionary in terms of our understanding of brain diseases and in fact all diseases. So as a summary, there's two major killers that are primarily regarded as as brain diseases in Australia that's dementia and stroke. Your stroke risk is very similar to your risk of heart disease and other vascular diseases and so trying to reduce the chance of that happening is very much along the lines of don't smoke, control high blood pressure, control bad cholesterol with things like statins, increase your level of physical activity. Dementia is different. Most dementia is Alzheimer's disease and the two major risk factors for Alzheimer's disease are non-modifiable. It's your age and the genetics that you're born with and in particular a gene variant called HOV4. There's also a vascular component although that varies from person to person but stroke avoidant measures or measures to avoid heart disease like I've mentioned just above are going to be useful at warning of dementia in a lot of individuals that can be underestimated. What about cognitive reserve? What about this idea of use it or lose it?  There is some truth in that and it probably emanates from the fact that people who have higher education have maybe developed their brain to a greater extent where it can withstand more pathology before the signs of dementia show but there's no really clear evidence or at least any evidence that you can stop dementia if you have those other modifiable risk factors and it seems just to put this in context that physical activity is probably doing more for you than the mental activity but it's all a little bit relative. What else? Well, that's what we're looking for in our lab and a lot of labs around the world. Our own lab uses human brain tissue and we're also lucky at University of Sydney and the Charles Perkins Center to have a brain bank. This brain bank collects tissue after people have died and you might not be aware that that is a possibility but you can donate your tissue to support research into brain diseases. So just lastly, if you're interested in this work and particularly interested in becoming a brain donor please get in contact with me or my staff at some of these resources. It's a great gift and it's making a lot of difference in the way we do research for future people and the risk of developing some of these terrible diseases. I thank you and I look forward to hearing your questions in the next part of this webinar. Thank you so much Greg, great to have you here. We've got quite a few questions here so let's get straight into it. Our first few questions are about research. So Linda asks, apart from a brain autopsy is there any way to determine if someone has had dementia with Lewy bodies? Yeah, dementia with Lewy bodies is a disease that's quite similar to Alzheimer's disease and in that way there will be similar findings on imaging and also some new blood-based biomarkers. Whether you could tell clinically that someone had DLB from Alzheimer's with any degree of confidence it's hard to say. There are a couple of clinical things that happen with DLB such as visual hallucinations which don't often happen with people with Alzheimer's disease. I think the other thing with dementia with Lewy bodies is that the Lewy bodies give the clue away that these people often have modus symptoms associated with Parkinson's disease. And a rule of thumb is that if you develop dementia within one year of your diagnosis of Parkinson's disease then it's likely to be dementia with Lewy bodies. The variation on that thing is if you don't develop dementia but you do develop eventually they use the term Parkinson's disease and dementia or Parkinson's disease dementia. So we're getting better we're getting better at differentiating between those diseases but there's no real diagnostic test at the moment. And with that research into blood tests once they become available for clinicians just to clarify they'll be able to tell the difference between Alzheimer's disease and Lewy body disease or are they just blood tests for dementia in general? Yeah, I think I think in terms of sensitivity they've got some good tests blood biomarkers that will pick out Alzheimer's disease so by exclusion if you've got a very similar disease to Alzheimer's and you have the general blood markers of a neurodegenerative process then you would probably have one of the other two common types of dementia being that particular dementia or dementia with Lewy bodies so there is a good chance you'd have it but I'm not aware that there is any either cut off with those general markers or specific markers for dementia with Lewy bodies at the moment. Okay, and another question from an anonymous attendee is how much research has been done into cohorts of society where dementia is more common for example people living with Down syndrome. Yes, quite a lot and within with some of the ethical constraints associated with the Down syndrome community but it's an interesting question because people with Down syndrome have three copies or try to assume three copies of chromosome 21 and the gene or the amyloid precursor protein which is cut up to produce the amyloid in our brains both normally and unfortunately abnormally that sits on chromosome 21 so for people with Down syndrome they inherit three copies and it's the inheriting those three copies in excess of the precursor protein that seems to lead to the Alzheimer's disease almost everyone with Down syndrome develops Alzheimer's disease and they tend to develop by about the fourth decade so it's quite a bit quicker than other people so Down syndrome is one of the key bits of evidence that there is a genetic of genetics in Alzheimer's disease and really people started from the knowing about Down syndrome in the trisomy 21 they started looking for gene duplications in people with Alzheimer's disease and in fact they eventually did find some but what they found first were different types of mutations and they were found in the early 90s so work done on Down syndrome was actually critical of starting this and work continues obviously it's very problematic for persons with Down syndrome living with Down syndrome's dementia so they should benefit from similar treatments that benefit the greater Alzheimer's disease community I would imagine OK great thank you so much so a few questions about comorbidities Ben asked he saw that you put trauma on the possible causes of brain disease and they were just wondering are concussions able to lead to dementia and if so how bad is that and how big of a risk factor is head trauma for Alzheimer's dementia so just in terms of Alzheimer's disease it's actually a single traumatic incident rather than this repetitive trauma that we might associate with contact sports that seems to be a risk factor for Alzheimer's disease if you have concussion and multiple concussions you can develop a very similar disease to Alzheimer's called chronic traumatic encephalography Alzheimer's disease and chronic traumatic encephalography or CTE both have built up of a protein called tau or fibroletal in the brains but where the tau builds up is slightly different between the two diseases and you don't get the amyloid build up so definitely multiple concussions probably there's a genetic influence there too it would lead to an Alzheimer's disease or like Alzheimer's disease but not Alzheimer's disease itself but there seems to be a risk associated with traumatic brain injury where you've lost consciousness that seems to show up in studies to be a risk factor for Alzheimer's disease okay, great and another question from Wasfi is if you have treated hypertension would hypertension still be a risk factor or is it reduced once it's treated? I think the simplest way to describe that is treatment is going in control of your hypertension or regulated blood pressure is going to reduce your risk immeasurably there are other issues that may while it wasn't treated or while it's building up there could be issues with some of your cerebrovascular or blood vessels within your brain they may lose a little bit of elasticity but in general if it's under control and I think we're really good at picking up hypertension when I say we do general practitioners if it's controlled it will be reducing your risk quite considerably okay and Crystal asks and also Jessica asks about this as well is there a link between migraine and dementia and also particularly long term migraine sufferers? Not that I know of but thanks for the question it's a very interesting question no, not that I know of that I have never read that that's the case so I don't believe so okay, well that's good to hear for people living with migraine and another question from Alice is what do you think about neuroplasticity and neurogenesis and she also kind of asked this in the context of concussions and head injury, sorry to go back to that but yeah I had a little bit to do with neurogenesis or neurogenesis studies a few years ago we started looking at it because it was suggested that alcohol could cause problems for the brain by depressing neurogenesis so neurogenesis is this idea or at least adult neurogenesis is this idea that neurons continue to be born throughout your life and born but there's stem cells, neural stem cells within your brain in two areas and we looked at that and we didn't find any difference with people with alcoholism but it also was becoming quite controversial what level of neurogenesis was happening in the brain so we actually looked at that over the lifespan of individuals from three months of age all the way up to 60 years of age I think at the time neurogenesis tailed off very abruptly around about three years of age and then continued to tail off from there so our own feeling is that although neurogenesis does exist it's more like a residual almost vestigial process in the adult brain it's not to say it can't be reignited if we understood how to do it so the distinction between neurogenesis and neuroplasticity is neuroplasticity is a much more broader situation and does happen in the brain so two aspects myelination or the insulating fat that sits around our axons that develops as we age well into our 20s and 30s so that's one of the last processes and then there's constant tinkering with the connections between neurons that we call synapses synapses can be removed, they can be strengthened both on a structural level and also within the cells on a molecular level so there is neuroplasticity neurogenesis not so much in the adult brain but we're still trying to work out how we could stimulate it great thank you so we've got a few questions here about general brain health Tali asks is there any evidence to suggest that fish oil supplements are beneficial for brain health and if so is that because of the anti-inflammatory effect yeah fish oil could have two effects it could be anti-laboratives or antioxidants probably it's also a good source of what they call good fats or non-trans fats which the brain requires fatty acids and then tends to make the fats that it needs including myelin but any source of fish oil and any other source of polyunsaturated fatty acids is always going to be good for the brain the exact relationships of what's happening at your gut level what's being produced in your liver and what reaches the brain and then what the brain is able to do with that still is a little bit unknown and it does get offset a little bit by aging in particularly an aging liver however in general those polyunsaturated fats and sources of them certainly would do no harm and are probably a good idea great Adrienne asks on the genetic side of things she asks it sounds like what's your opinion on that do you think that's true or what do you have to say yeah look it's pretty I think it's important to make the distinction between EpoE4 EpoE4 is a variant that around about at least 8% yeah but about 20% of the population carried that variant it's not a mutation so mutations are in three other genes and if you have those mutations you will definitely develop the disease if you have one copy of the variant EpoE4 as opposed to the more common forms EpoE3 then your lifetime risk increases about two fold but if you do have two copies then it increases your lifetime risk at ten times that means if you are a homozygote or you have two copies of EpoE4 then you've got about a 50% chance of developing Alzheimer's disease during your life so I wouldn't say I wouldn't say people are doomed and this is the sporadic form of the disease so it is affecting people in their eighth decade albeit if you are a homozygote for that genetic variant it does bring your age of onset a little bit closer we spend a lot of time thinking about how EpoE4 causes the disease unfortunately we still don't know but there are many theories that I could go into if someone is interested so 50% of people won't get it and similarly if you don't have EpoE4 even though your risk of getting Alzheimer's decreases you can still get the disease interesting and also with this new research around genetic testing and what we are learning about the genetic factors of Alzheimer's disease an anonymous attendee asked do you recommend elderly people or anyone really to have a test for that gene for example every few years or something how would that work clinically I think I have to be a little bit careful here giving clinical advice as I am a scientist but I think most people would recommend that if you have a very strong family history of the disease for example Alzheimer's disease you have a number of first degree relatives and then you probably should go and get some genetic testing or at least go to a genetic counsellor and that testing would be done on the genes including amyloid precursor protein gene APP and two others when it comes to EpoE4 and testing I know there was an Australian actor and found out that he had two copies of the EpoE4 I don't know at the moment if we could do anything with that information so I would advise people not to do that the variation on that theme is that there have been people put into trials who are EpoE4 homozygates so they have two copies for the amyloid modifying drugs so there are reasons why you might want to know but in general that information probably won't help you and may just lead you to having to worry one other thing I should say is genetics you have them for life so if you were to find out you were EpoE4 at 20 you would still be at 80 years of age so it's not something you would have to continue to do your genetics are permanent and mutable in just about every situation so definitely not having to go for a test after test okay and Viv asked in general with brain health what about general anesthetics because it seems that many people are concerned about how general anesthetics affect brain health there is something called well brain fog we use that term transient dementia that in certain elderly people when I make the point elderly say in the 70s at least 70s where they do develop a dementia it tends to be transient as far as I know but it is a known thing now what that mechanism would be I think we would all be guessing and I wouldn't hazard a guess at the moment I don't know enough about it I mean if you then compare that with the amount of general anesthetics that happen on a daily basis and I think the risk is minimal compared with that yes it is certainly something that does happen it often has a transient effect and people do recover their cognitive function but it is something that we are interested in but I will not know what the mechanism would be okay another question Steve asks what are the epigenetic factors that are relevant to dementias simple answer there is yes and just to clarify what Steve will be referring to this is the idea that there is some changes to your genetics that aren't heritable there are two types it doesn't really matter going into them but it appears that for cells like neurons they can accumulate over the life of the person these epigenetic changes which will affect gene expression patterns I talked about transcriptomics which is looking at gene expression but there are other experiments you can do where you can look for epigenetic changes and there is evidence that there are these changes associated with the disease it is not my forte but there is no doubt that they are important epigenetics it is a natural process it is a way that we can turn on genes at different times of our lifespan working out what is normal from what is abnormal is always a challenge but yes it is part of the puzzle okay great we have also got two questions here one from an anonymous attendee asking about COVID and possible links to dementia Angie asked specifically if there are any links between people who have had long COVID or significant long term brain fog as well thank you really for that question anything that is COVID related is sort of just come across our so to speak it seems like we talk about the direction of causation in these diseases and it seems the other way around that if you were a higher risk of people with dementia or a higher risk of COVID related mortality moving back in the direction when the COVID is bad for dementia I did read a paper the other day talking about the risk factor but not because the COVID virus or SARS-CoV-2 virus gets into the brain they actually think it is more from the respiratory point of view and relates to hypoxia so just not as much oxygen reaching the brain and contributing to dementia that way long term brain fog or long term brain fog with associated cognition deficits we just don't know enough about it at the moment but it is certainly worrying there has been there has been a mouse model where they had been deliberately infected with COVID-19 and they showed that they could increase the amount of ammo and that is certainly something we are looking at but as I say at the moment they do think that is a result of the hypoxia rather than the virus actually getting into the brain okay great and just really while we are right up to the hour if we can squeeze in one quick question from Rose asking how do people plan to risk do you have any advice or thoughts on that I think the only people that are really at risk and this is a very rare these are a very small part of the population and less than 1% of those actually carry a mutation even if you are homozygous for the two copies of FOE I said your lifetime risk is 50% you are going to affect you in your 80s so I would really say to young people or people up in the middle age and even into their 60s and 70s I would not be worrying about that other than that the best advice is that by remaining physically active not smoking and all of those advice including diet like the Mediterranean diet these are all going to reduce your chance of dementia because for the card carrying dementia sufferer they are going to have a component of Alzheimer's disease causing your cognitive decline but also a component of vascular dementia so reducing your chance of that is going to prolong your cognitive function there is these treatments on the horizon in Australia that have been approved in the United States I mean in some ways and disappointingly that we are talking in levels of 27% of reduction in cognitive decline over the period that the people were on the trial so they are not massive effects and that is probably what we are working on so our advice at the moment is the same advice for healthy body really not smoking, exercising and good food but other than that even if you did have these genetic variants that increase your risk of Alzheimer's disease I wouldn't be worrying too much about that okay great well thank you so much for your time Greg and thank you everyone for your questions sorry that we couldn't get to all of them we had a lot of fantastic questions tonight but yeah thank you so much and we hope everyone has a fantastic brain awareness week thanks for joining us


What's going on guys? It's your boy DPJ here today with another Destiny video and in today's video we have top 5 epic sniper feeds of the week And when I mean epic, some of these are absolutely incredible, one at all, much better than what I could ever do If you guys enjoyed the video, if you could leave a like, I would appreciate the support Submit any badass clip you've got to the email address linked in the top of the video description Enjoy the video and I'll catch you guys on the next one Call Down! Amazing! Available! The Lean! Double Down! About DPJ!


Good day, fellow investors! I don't know if you remember, but in the video where we discussed the stock charts, stock market charts that you have never seen, we also discussed research from Professor Macquarie from the Santa Clara University that has shown that from 1929 till 2009, if you would have invested $10,000 and reinvested the dividends and everything in 1929, in 2009 you would have $9 million. However, if you omit dividends and you omit inflation, the $10,000 would be just $33,000. So 99.7% of stock market returns from 1929 till 2009 were from dividends and inflation, so that is something very important to think about when investing in the long term. And in this video we will discuss the current dividend environment. I'm sure there are a lot of you who love dividends. I'm also thinking about dividends and how that impacts, but also I always look at dividends as a margin of safety and as something that pays me while I wait for some other catalyst. As I do a lot of research, I like to have all the combinations there. So let's go discuss the sector dividends, check them globally and check the top 10 dividend payers in the world. First, what's very important is that the current S&P 500 dividend is at historical lows. It is incredibly how much higher the dividend was in the past. And that's why it's logical that the returns coming from investing in stocks were mostly thanks to dividends in the past. Now the situation is much, much different. 1.81% is the current yield. However, the historical average is 4.37%. And that's a huge difference for dividend investors. Now let's see what the Janus Henderson report for dividends tells us. If you look at dividend index by the regions, you can see how the Asia-Pacific, the red line is really doing good. And the North American line is also doing great, followed by Japan. The areas that didn't do so good with growth are especially emerging markets that were leading the pack up till 2014, but then crashed. We have seen emerging markets, of course, they're impacted by lower commodity prices. But we also know that commodity prices are cyclical. So if there is a reversal, if you're looking for dividend growth, I would really look into emerging markets for dividend growth. Europe has a lot of problems, as I keep saying. And that's why you also see that even with all the Europe printing there is going on, the dividends aren't really growing. And Europe is the worst performers over the last seven years. Now, what's very, very interesting is that if you look at Asia-Pacific, excluding Japan, and the emerging market dividends, that is 41% of global dividends. If you look at North America, that's 41% of global dividends. So emerging markets in Asia-Pacific, 41% of dividends. North America, 41% of dividends. The North American market has, I don't know, 50, 60, 70% of the global market capitalization, adding Europe that really dwarfs everything else. So emerging markets have much, much better valuations, much, much higher dividend yields. So if you're looking for dividends, I would really switch my 1.8% SAP 500 dividend with something better, stabbler, higher dividend in emerging markets, because the valuations are extremely different. Look at the sectors, the tech sector. I hope I pronounced it well today. The tech sector beats everybody. Then it's followed by consumer discretionary and financials. Bad performance, again, basic materials, which is now reverting. Utilities didn't see much growth, no inflation, they cannot increase prices. So low dividend growth for them. If there is inflation, they might do better in the future. Oil gas, still very low. Telecommunications, very, very bad. Of course, no growth there. So it's very interesting also to go and see what sectors. I think basic materials, commodities will revert to the mean, because those are cyclical and can still be bought on the cheap, especially if dividends start growing. If prices start growing, you will see good stock performances coming there, as investors prefer to buy later when the dividend is higher than earlier when the stock price is cheap. Now let's look at the top 10 dividend payers. We have China Mobile Limited, China Construction Bank Corporation, Taiwan Semiconductor in Commonwealth Bank of Australia, Royal Dutch Shell, Westpac Australian Bank again, Exxon, Apple and Gasprom Vodafone. The yields, China Mobile 4%, China Construction Bank 4.71, Taiwan Semiconductor in Manufacturing 2.44, Bank of Australia 7.5%, Royal Dutch Shell 5.5%, 5.9%, Westpac Banking, Exxon 3.5, Apple just 1.4, Gasprom 6%, Vodafone 3.46. So these are all big companies, great global companies. However, the dividends are very very different. So depending on what you're looking for, what are the risks, I would really look into dividend yielders that pay higher dividends because I think there can be the similar growth, similar stability, similar risks and higher dividends if you just look around the world what's there. We'll continue discussing dividend stocks, so please subscribe to the channel, click like for channel support and there will be plenty more interesting investments where to invest in. So the message, take advantage of the cyclicality, take advantage of what's going on related to the cyclicality in the commodity environment, in emerging markets and take advantage of the extremely high valuations in developed markets.  Thank you for watching, looking forward to your comments and I'll see you in the next video.


So, this is the short view drive culvert improvement project meeting also known as the short view at farmer drive hazardous road over topping mitigation project. And I just want to thank everybody for attending tonight. I really appreciate it. My name is Michael well bomb. I'm the project manager for this meeting or for this project. And with us tonight is Misty Christian. She is with Kimley Horn and associates. She has Nick with her as well. The two of them are responsible for putting the plans together and getting this job designed and they did a great job. So, thanks very much guys for your hard work. Also with us tonight is our contractor on this project. His name is Kurt Hansen. He's with IBC Texas or IBC TX LLC. They're a bridge and culvert contracting company. They were the low bidder on this job and I'm very excited to have them on this job. So far, we've had a great relationship and I look forward to a very successful project from, from everyone tonight.  I'll give a quick project background and then I'll talk a little bit about the project scope. And most importantly, the traffic control plans for this job. And as we're going through that, we'll talk a little bit about construction. And then at the end, I'll, I'll answer any questions you have, but there's a chat window. If you think of a question you want to ask, please put it in the chat window or jot it down. And at the end, I'll open the floor for any questions that you may have. So, let's get started. So, this project is located at Shoreview Drive just to the west of Bomber Drive. There's a little stretch of Lake Worth that touches the downstream end of our project actually right now. It touches the upstream end too. I understand the lake's up a little bit, but that's the location where this project is. There's a existing set of small diameter pipe culverts at that location, and we're going to replace those with large boxes to handle the flow. There's a pretty significant drainage area to the south and also to the, to the east from from the Lockheed Martin facility, all of which drain through that that culvert crossing. And at times it has created a condition where the road has overtopped and certainly has the potential to do that again. So that's been the impetus behind this project is to, to reduce the hazard to roadway overtopping at that location. You'll see that we have a schedule, a milestone schedule. It's just a real basic schedule that we've been working on. I was happy to add another check mark to that schedule and we're now down to construction start. I believe we'll be breaking ground in June. We've got all the contracts signed in the process of getting a purchase order issued. We'll have pre-construction meeting likely in the next couple of weeks and a notice to proceed. So I expect about mid-June that we'll start seeing some construction activity out there on the project site. I do have the project slated to go through December of 2021, but the bulk of the work will be done likely long before that. They'll just be cleaning up in some last minute pieces. So I really don't expect that this project will extend that far with any major disruption. The project scope is basically, as I said, there are some existing culvert pipes that run under the pavement and we're going to replace those with new box culverts. You can see the kind of the bluish color that runs in towards the lake right in the middle of the road. Those are new box culverts. There'll be 10 by 10 boxes that will be constructed at that location with head walls on either side. There will be retaining walls on the upstream side that will allow for access down into the channel so maintenance crews can go in.  It's pretty rough, but that is the access way to get down into the channel. At the end, there'll be new guardrails put up on the project. We're extending the culverts far enough on the north side to allow for a future trail or a sidewalk. I don't know if anything's planned at the moment. Maybe some long-range planning has something in there, but we've definitely left room for additional expansion if needed. Then at the end, we'll relocate some utility lines. You see the water and the sewer that run east and west down the roadway. Those will be relayed, reconnected, and then we'll put paving over, new pavement over the project area. That's generally the scope of this project. It should go fairly quickly. It's not a tremendous amount of work and it's all isolated and located just right there at the culvert crossing. To do all of this work, we will have the road closed during construction. We have a detour plan set up where essentially, rather than being able to go through from Shoreview Drive from east to west or west to east, the detour route will take you down to Silver Creek Road to get in and out if you're coming off of 820. We've coordinated this with Lockheed Martin. They're aware of the project and they don't see a procedure with this temporary detour that we're going to do. The detour will probably last, I'm going to guess, two months, maybe three, but it'll be an extended period of time while they're working. We've also coordinated with Lake Worth. They're aware of this and their project is complete. The project they had on Clifford and Bomber along that stretch is done, so this shouldn't pose a problem for their perspective either. That is pretty much all I have to go over tonight. I'm going to open the floor to questions. Again, my name is Michael Welbaum. I'm the project manager on this project. My number is<PHONE_NUMBER>, and my email address is michael.welbaum. That's W-E-L-L-V-A-U-M at portworthtexas.gov. Eddie, you have something that says, save some of the CCC work. Can you explain that? Yes, sir. Currently, I knew maybe, yeah, okay. Can you hear me? Yes, I can hear you. Okay. Currently, on the upstream side of what's there now is some old head wall work that was built by the CCC back in the day. I was just wondering if we could save some of that, some portions of that, and use other places, and by me and other places, there is a area over by the National Guard, and I had to coordinate with the Park Department. There's an area where people pull in to dump. I was just wondering if we could take some of that rock work and get them to stack it in there to create a barricade or something. Yeah, I'm glad you brought that up. The wall that is visible from the road side that runs right along the roadway, we're going to remove that wall and salvage it, store it, and then at the end of the project, that wall will be reconstructed to approximate the look that it has now. So when you drive down the road in the future, you'll see the same wall. There'll be a guardrail between the road and the wall, because that wall is really not going to stop a vehicle the way it is, but that wall will be constructed. Now there is the possibility of some additional rock work that goes down the back face of the wall. We'd have to coordinate with the contractor on that. I don't know if any of that would be salvageable, but it's possible they could stockpile it somewhere for someone to use later. Okay, that's how I can certainly talk to them about it. Sure, that sounds good. They have this, the Park Department has areas around the lake where they have placed big stones off the shoulder of the road to keep people from dumping the stuff. So anything that we would place along the road, I would have to coordinate with the Park Department. Very good. Well, I'll make a note to, and I'll follow up with the contractor and and Eddie, I believe I have your contact information so I can reach out to you separately. Okay. Are there any other questions tonight? I just did all my shredding. I'm sorry to say that again. Phil, I'm not sure if you are you asking a question or we were just picking up some background noise. If there are no further questions this evening, this is this has been recorded and I believe it will be posted on the city's website along with the other information about this project. So if you want to refer back to it in the future, you certainly can. And if you have any questions, please don't hesitate to let me know. Again, here's my contact information if you need it, Michael Wellbaum,<PHONE_NUMBER>. Thank you all for for attending tonight and we'll look forward to a good construction project and get this thing wrapped up and get a new new culvert in. Thank you. So thank you all for attending tonight.