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Kathleen appeared to have early Alzheimer’s Disease and was struggling with some of the changes that the disease brings to her everyday living so she was adjusting for example to having trouble driving and slowly have to give that up or have to make other daily life changes like perhaps having help with her medications. She was also coming to terms with the symptoms that she was having as with her husband and these are pretty typical kinds of issues that people with Alzheimer’s Disease deal with in the very early stages of the disease.
What was uncommon about Kathleen was that she was quite aware of her symptoms and she was noticing what was happening to her whereas about 2/3 of people with Alzheimer’s don’t have that level of awareness.
If somebody is concerned about an older family member, they ought to be looking really for changes in that person’s function in day to day. Are they starting to have memory symptoms that are really affecting their ability to do basic daily functions? Are they having trouble keeping track of their check book? Are they having trouble remembering to pay their bills? Are they starting to react to their memory symptoms to get depressed, irritable, explosive? Are they starting to hide or cover up? Are they repeating things over and over? Those kinds of symptoms are the ones to look for. So if you have the signs and symptoms, get evaluated, talk to your doctor. If your doctor is unsure about what to do, ask them if they can get you to a specialist.
So the treatment plan that we recommend for people with Alzheimer’s, we call it dementia care. It really has four elements, one is managing disease to the extent that we can and that usually means medications or managing risk factors, so keeping blood pressure for example under control, diabetes and cholesterol. Keeping the person as active as possible, keeping them socialized, etc. We’re trying basically to delay progression. The second is managing symptoms. And there, we mostly use medicines and other approaches to target memory loss, behavioral symptoms, depression, agitation, delusions and the like. The third part of the treatment plan is providing supportive care, making sure that the patient has a place to stay. Their needs and wants are well taken care of. Safety issues are dealt with like driving, medication supervision and the like. And the fourth part of the dementia care plan is caring for the caregiver making sure that the caregiver has the right skills to be a caregiver, that they’re properly educated about what to expect. They have people to turn to in a crisis and that they have respite plans that are appropriate to the circumstance. And this whole plan changes as the disease progresses. So it’s dynamic if you will adapting to whatever the pace of progression happens to be for the particular patient.
There’s some proof that keeping physically active with a variety of physical activities, keeping active in social settings and also maintaining mental activity through things like crossword puzzles, video games and the like, might reduce the risk of getting Alzheimer’s Disease. It’s not definitive proof but it’s fairly good proof. So I recommend that people try and have some basic exercise routine that they socialize as much as they can and engage with people in their social network and that they also try and some basic mental activity if not, work or something like it which stimulates them to use many parts of their brain at once.
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