Dementia research & comics

You probably all know the comic books of Tintin or the Smurfs or Asterix & Obelix or … Many comic book authors have a link with Belgium and it is consequently no surprise that Brussels is host to the Belgian comic art museum. Beautiful, certainly plan some time for a visit next time you are in Brussels!

On the international Alzheimer day of 21^st September 2026, the museum was the venue for the Belgian conference on psychosocial dementia research. Based on the knowledge agenda of the Flemish Expertise Centre on Dementia and the funding of Stopalzheimer, more than 10 research projects presented their results. As a challenge, we asked every presenter to link their topic/results to a well know character from comic books. So for example a project on family caregiving joined forces with the Smurfs and had AI-generated new characters to illustrate the diversity of family caregivers and caregiving, and present their family caregiving compass. All in all, this resulted in a day packed with information from recent research combined with a lot of creativity and laughs.