Battling Alzheimer

Research has shown that Alzheimer’s disease begins long before symptoms begin to manifest.  Therefore, you need to act sooner rather than later if you suspect that your loved one may be Battling the Monster, Alzheimer’s disease.

Here are a few reasons that you should make an appointment: More →

Happy Monday!

Did you get some REST over the weekend?  I hope you did, cuz Monday isn’t comin’ it is here.  Which means, if you are in the sandwich generation, it’s time to deal with school, extra curricular activities and caregiving.  If you are not in the sandwich, you are back to the workweek and still have lots to do.

I thought we’d spend the first part of this week talking about an uncomfortable, but almost inevetible part of Alzheimer’s caregiving.  Incontinence. 

More →

Battling Alzheimer’s Disease and its Compatriot Wandering

By nature, I am a pretty even tempered person. Not much gets under my skin. However, my mother’s wandering really got to me. She’d gather her coat and purse, and head for the door. By the time she had taken 10-15 steps, my normally 96/54 blood pressure had skyrocketed to stroke levels and I was s-t r-e-s-s-e-d.

No matter how much I talked, explained, used logic and my persuasion skills, she remained intent on going. Sometimes, she’d slip out of the door, without my knowing, and my toddler would announce to me that grandma was going, “bye, bye.”

More →

Alzheimer’s is a disease of fragility. A mind can handle all sorts of problems, but when the brain has too many stresses, it starts to show symptoms. For goodness sake, you and I show mental weakness when we’re sleep-deprived, don’t we? Or food-deprived, or feverish, or overly-worried? For someone who already has plaques and tangles and brain damage from a stroke, it may take less to push them into confusion and delusions than it would for you and me.

Even soft drinks aren’t safe. In Life without Memories, I read that sugared drinks seem to make laboratory mice more forgetful and increase the amount of “amyloid plaque deposit” in their brains, the most typical physical evidence of Alzheimer’s disease. Read the article in the Journal of Biological Chemistry if you don’t believe it. My grandmother drank a lot of decaf sodas, which we hoped would keep her from losing weight. But later she usually asked for plain water.

More →

Alzheimer’s experts now believe that the disease, and even the symptoms, begins many years before any formal diagnosis. German researchers Drs. Heiko and Eva Braak theorize that, if you looked, Alzheimer’s structures (plaques and tangles) could be found in the brains of teenagers, 60 years before serious symptoms develop. They have already found such structures in twenty-year-olds.

Current tests for Alzheimer’s are actually psychological and cognitive tests - the only absolute test for Alzheimer’s is a brain dissection. But according to the New York Times, a radioactive dye, PIB, has been developed that allows researchers to locate amyloid protein deposits, considered a sign of Alzheimer’s disease, in the brains of living people. The problem is that there are not yet any reliable medications to prevent the disease, so tests with PIB would tell more people they have the disease without being able to stop it.

More →

After she was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, my grandmother never became violent or extremely angry. She had lived with some angry people, apparently, and I think she decided she couldn’t win by out-raging them. She eventually found other ways of dealing with conflict. She was involved in some family violence, but nobody ever told me if she hit back.

Most of the things that made her angry would have made other people angry. Her daughter had been mistreated by a husband a few decades earlier: time to let that go, but certainly a reason for anger. Siblings had fought over the family inheritance: also time to let that go, though she had reason for resentment. Though she didn’t remember the inheritance negotiations accurately, it’s probably true that they could have been more fair to her. She remembered the feelings of unfairness but not the details. So she reacted to and reconstructed the events according to her memory and her feelings.

More →

Most (but not all) Alzheimer’s patients are elderly. They have had many years to learn how to deal with all sorts of embarrassing and uncomfortable situations. Especially in the early stages of Alzheimer’s, they use their (immense) social skills to cover up their weaknesses. (But don’t we all.) These social skills make it possible for them to hide the symptoms of their disease, at first. I wonder how much Ronald Reagan did that when he was President. How many people even suspected that he had Alzheimer’s disease, before he announced it after he left office? As we’ve written before, stages of Alzheimer’s vary from person to person. The earliest stages are hard to detect.

For example, an elderly person may have a great sense of humor but a short memory for recent events. So they make jokes instead of simply making the embarrassing admission, “I don’t remember.” They entertain you, they have you rolling on the floor, and you may never understand that, inside their heads, there is a gap that troubles them very much. Humor doesn’t merely put an audience at ease, though it does that. It also puts the humorist at ease.

More →

By Linda J Bruton

The research for a cure for Alzheimer’s disease is actually accelerating. This neurodegenerative disease that adversely affects millions of older Americans is receiving continued assistance from the Alzheimer Association. The Alzheimer’s Association is the leading national advocate for Alzheimer’s disease. The National Alzheimer’s Association provides ongoing support and funding for research and education for Alzheimer’s disease.

Alzheimer’s Disease affects the higher cortical functions of the brain. The functions that are compromised include memory, thinking and orientation. The Alzheimer’s Association in conjunction with the pharmaceutical industry provides ongoing testing and facilitation for research that will stop the progression of this disease.

More →