‘It’s been quite a ride’: Henry Brodaty’s extraordinary story

In the mid-1970s, Professor Henry Brodaty was on a rite-of-passage trip to Europe when his life changed course in the most profound way.
 
‘I went overseas … I’d done the physicians’ exams,’ he told newsGP.
 
‘I went to England and we did the usual thing … we were in our 20s and we travelled around Europe for six months and I did my first year of psychiatry.’
 
But the news back home in Sydney was not good. His parents, both Holocaust survivors who had become parents to him in a displaced persons’ camp outside Munich in 1947, were struggling.
 
His father, Jacob, described by Professor Brodaty as ‘a very bright man’ who used to sweep all before him in chess competitions at the camp, had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease a few years previously at the age of 52.
 
At first, the situation was manageable, but it deteriorated while Professor Brodaty was away.
 
‘Things were getting difficult for my mother,’ he said. ‘And so, we came home.’
 
Once back in Australia, he finished his psychiatry training and became a fellow of both the physician and psychiatrist colleges.
 
‘That was in 1977 – by this stage my father was really significantly impaired and needed a lot of help,’ he said.
 
Professor Brodaty recalls a very challenging landscape for carers, including his mother, Sarah.
 
‘There were no services around there,’ he said. ‘There weren’t things like aged care packages, no one talked about respite care.’
 
On one trip to a sheltered day centre, Professor Brodaty witnessed his father struggling with a basic task of putting enough rubber bands into a matchbox to balance with a weight on a pair of scales.
 
‘He couldn’t understand that concept,’ he said. ‘I remember walking away from there in tears about that.’
 
Jacob Brodaty died after a heart attack in 1979 at the age of 59.
 
‘That hit me very hard and I didn’t realise how hard it hit me until my wife told me how impossible I’d been for the year afterwards,’ Professor Brodaty said.
 
Beyond the emotional toll, his father’s death started to have an ever more pivotal impact on his career, both clinically and in a burgeoning role as an advocate and researcher.


Professor Henry Brodaty as a child, with his parents Jacob and Sarah

In his psychiatry practice, word got around and he started seeing more older patients with dementia.
 
One patient’s son, based in St Louis in the United States, sent him details of that country’s newly formed Alzheimer’s Disease and Related Disorders Association.
 
‘I thought we should do the same thing here and I got together a few people,’ he said.
 
‘We were able to get some media attention for this … and we ended up having 500 people at the Teachers’ Federation Hall in Sussex Street that came along to this first public meeting.’
 
That meeting, held in May 1982, set in train organisations across the country that would eventually morph into today’s Dementia Australia.
 
Separately, while working as superintendent at the psychiatric unit at Sydney’s Prince Henry Hospital in the 1980s, Professor Brodaty oversaw pioneering work that reinforced the crucial role of carers, and the difference supporting them can make.
 
He helped set up a 10-day residential training program for carers and people with dementia, which showed a marked impact on caregiver stress.
 
‘We used various measures of depression or distress, and they went down,’ he said.
 
‘And then over a three-year follow-up, we showed that we reduced nursing home admission. We had a control group where the patients just came in for respite care.
 
‘But the intervention group was patient and family member coming in together, usually a spouse, and over a seven-year follow-up, the rate of admission was five times lower.’
 
Working with general practice
There was also plenty of work to do with GPs.

Professor Brodaty had earlier connections with general practice, having worked as a locum GP in suburban Sydney before heading overseas. He also produced a doctoral thesis looking at brief psychotherapy and did a randomised controlled trial for a program consisting of eight half-hour sessions designed for general practice. 
 
‘Unfortunately, I didn’t do any better than no treatment or GP treatment and so that was the end of my psychotherapy career,’ he said.
 
Psychotherapy’s loss would prove to be dementia patients’ gain, with Professor Brodaty working hard to shift a prevailing attitude in general practice that little was to be gained in a diagnosis.
 
‘[GPs] said, “look, what’s the point of making a diagnosis – there’s nothing we can do. I don’t want to alarm the patient, I don’t want to alarm the family, and it takes too long to do cognitive assessment”,’ he said.
 
To help counter that, he helped develop GPCOG, a dementia screening tool designed for general practice.
 
He acknowledges its limitations in measuring change – he now personally uses the Montreal Cognitive Assessment – but GPCOG’s 2002 launch saw it gain a reputation as a fast, highly effective screening tool which became routinely used in primary care around the world.
 
In fact, the work following a dementia diagnosis is among the areas Professor Brodaty wants to emphasise most to GPs: that it goes far beyond writing a script or a referral.
 
‘When I talk to GPs, I say this is a long haul,’ he said.
 
‘This is a partnership between you and the patient and the family and services. It’s not like you diagnose it and that’s it.
 
‘It’s a continuing journey of different problems at different stages.’
 
He points to more than 5000 GPs around Australia who have now gone on courses through Dementia Training Australia.
 
If anything, however, it is Professor Brodaty’s recent work as a researcher on ways to prevent a diagnosis that could be his most trailblazing yet.
 
A co-founder of the Centre for Healthy Ageing in Sydney, he set up an online trial called Maintain Your Brain, which ran from 2018–21 and was designed to help prevent cognitive decline and dementia.
 
Combining modules addressing nutrition, physical activity, brain training and peace of mind, it targeted adults aged 55–77 with at least two major factors for dementia.
 
The results were striking, with a randomised controlled trial showing ‘significantly better cognition in older adults over three years’.
 
With dementia now the highest underlying cause of mortality in Australia, Professor Brodaty believes there is enormous potential for such interventions to make an even wider difference.
 
‘[Dementia] is going to get more pronounced because of the ageing of the population,’ he said.
 
‘I don’t think anyone’s yet proven you can prevent dementia.
 
‘But what we do argue is that by improving cognition over three years in 55 to 77-year-olds, we have delayed the onset. 
 
‘Every year we can delay the onset there’s a 10% reduction in incidence of dementia.’
 
Last year, he also used an appearance at the National Press Club to call for a dementia awareness campaign akin to the ‘Slip, Slop, Slap’ initiative run by the Cancer Council in the 1980s.
 
Months later, he won the 2026 Senior Australian of the Year award, which has given yet more impetus to the work.
 
‘It was a real honour, and I felt privileged to have that title,’ said Professor Brodaty, who dedicated his acceptance speech to his mother and father and all people with dementia.
 
‘It really gave me a wonderful platform to try and promote certain ideas, certain things that I think would be helpful for people with dementia, for the community at large and for family carers.
 
‘Since then, it’s been quite a ride.’
 
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Alzheimer’s disease dementia Henry Brodaty researcher Senior Australian of the Year