Rite Aid is dedicated to helping caregivers take care of their loved ones - and that often means providing answers to difficult questions. Many commonly asked questions may have already been answered by our pharmacists and other experts. You can search here to learn more about Dementia and Alzheimer’s disease.
A: If you’re caring for someone with Alzheimer’s disease, your strongest asset might be a positive attitude.
Researchers at Wake Forest University School of Medicine in Winston-Salem, NC, found a link between younger, less-educated caregivers who seemed overwhelmed or depressed and dementia patients who showed hard-to-manage behavior, such as asking repetitive questions, wandering off, demonstrating anger or behaving destructively. “These symptoms are part of the disease,” says the study’s author, Kaycee Sink, MD, a Wake Forest assistant professor of gerontology, “and the caregivers aren’t causing them. But certain styles of caregiving may bring them out.” For example, if you’re feeling overburdened, you’re probably irritable. Your irritability may provoke a patient’s difficult behavior, says Sink.
The study, reported in the May 2006 issue of The Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, looked at nearly 6,000 dementia patients and their caregivers, most of whom were a spouse, daughter or daughter-in law. “We’re not trying to blame the caregivers,” explains Sink, “but to better understand the complex puzzle.”
Article provided by Caring Today magazine and www.caringtoday.com
A: According to research from Taiwan, patients with dementia who received regular acupressure treatments were calmer, wandered less and appeared less restless.
Acupressure is a Chinese healing technique, a relative to acupuncture, that uses manual massage of specific pressure points instead of the insertion of needles. In the Taiwan study that appeared in the February 2007 edition of the Journal of Clinical Nursing, 20 patients underwent twice-a-day 15-minute sessions, five days a week. When treatments stopped after four weeks, the patients regressed and became more agitated.
“Agitated behavior in people with dementia is a major concern for caregivers,” says study co-author Li-Chan Lin, PhD, RN, a professor at the Institute of Clinical Nursing at National Yang-Ming University. “It can endanger patients and others, make it necessary for them to be moved from familiar surroundings, and demoralize and psychologically distress caregivers.”
Caregivers, says the professor, can learn the technique, making acupressure “an effective option that, following training, can be carried out at home.”
Article provided by Caring Today magazine and www.caringtoday.com
A: Both caregivers and patients benefit from formal training, counseling and support, a group of recent studies has found.
"Dementia caregivers have a lot of problems—such as a high level of stress, depression and anxiety—and are more prone to becoming physically ill themselves," says Richard Schulz, PhD, a professor of psychiatry and co-author of a study at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, where he is director of gerontology and director of the University Center for Social and Urban Research.
His research team divided 642 dementia caregivers into two groups for six months. One was supported with nine in-home visits by professional staff, plus three 30-minute phone consultations and five by-telephone group sessions. The other group received only a packet of written educational material and two short phone calls.
Schulz's study, reported in the November 21, 2006, issue of the Annals of Internal Medicine, found the supported group demonstrated less stress and was better able to take care of both themselves and their patients. Moreover, only about 13 percent of the supported group suffered from clinical depression, as compared with about 23 percent of the group that didn't get the full-support program.
In that same issue of the Annals of Internal Medicine was a study from the University of California, Los Angeles. In the UCLA project, 238 patient/caregiver pairs were assigned to a case management group and 170 pairs were not. The assisted pairs got a year of personal support, as well as help in identifying local resources. Although caregivers did not report improvements in their own well-being, researchers noted that the patients were much better cared for than those in the unassisted group.
And a Dutch study found big benefits were derived from teaching dementia patients how to cope with their decline while teaching caregivers how to cope with their loved ones. After 10 sessions of training, 82 percent of the patients needed less help with day-to-day tasks, and about half the caregivers said they felt more competent.
Article provided by Caring Today magazine and www.caringtoday.com (link to http://www.caringtoday.com)
A: Alzheimer's disease is the most common cause of dementia among older people. It involves parts of the brain that control thought, memory, and language. Alzheimer's damages a person's ability to reason, remember, speak, perform simple calculations, and carry out routine tasks. Over time, patients also may become anxious or aggressive or wander away from home. In the later stages, they may forget how to do basic tasks, like brushing their teeth or dressing themselves. Eventually, patients need total care.
A: People with Alzheimer's often live for years with the disease, eventually dying from pneumonia or other diseases. The time from diagnosis to end of life varies. It can be as little as 3 years if the person is over 80 when diagnosed. Or, it may be as long as 10 years or more if the person is younger.
A: Alzheimer's develops slowly, starting with mild memory problems and ending in death. The course the disease takes and how fast changes occur vary from person to person.
Signs of mild Alzheimer's can include:
- memory loss
- confusion about the location of familiar places
- taking longer to accomplish normal daily tasks
- trouble handling money and paying bills
- poor judgment leading to bad decisions
- loss of spontaneity and sense of initiative
- mood and personality changes
- increased anxiety
Signs of moderate Alzheimer's can include:
- increasing memory loss and confusion
- shortened attention span
- problems recognizing friends and family members
- difficulty with language, including problems with reading and writing
- difficulty working with numbers
- difficulty organizing thoughts and thinking logically
Signs of moderate Alzheimer's can also include:
- inability to learn new things or cope with new or unexpected situations
- restlessness, agitation, anxiety, tearfulness
- wandering -- especially in the late afternoon or at night
- repetitive statements or movement, occasional muscle twitches
- hallucinations and delusions, suspiciousness or paranoia, irritability
- loss of impulse control
- perceptual-motor problems
Symptoms of severe Alzheimer's include
- Inability to recognize family or loved ones
- Inability to communicate
- loss of sense of self
- weight loss
- seizures, skin infections, difficulty swallowing
- groaning, moaning, or grunting
- increased sleeping
- lack of bladder and bowel control
- total dependence on the caregiver
A: Scientists do not yet fully understand what causes Alzheimer's. However, it is clear that Alzheimer's disease develops when a complex series of events in the brain gradually causes nerve cells in the brain to stop working and die. Age is the most important known risk factor for Alzheimer's disease.
A: At specialized centers, doctors can diagnose "possible" or "probable" Alzheimer's disease correctly up to 90 percent of the time. Doctors use several tools to diagnose "probable" Alzheimer's disease. These tools include a complete medical history and tests that measure memory, problem solving, attention, counting, and language abilities. Medical tests such as analysis of blood, urine, or spinal fluid are used to determine if the dementia has another cause.
A: No treatment is yet available that can stop Alzheimer's disease. However, for some people in the early and middle stages of the disease, there are drugs that may help prevent some symptoms from becoming worse for a limited time. One of the drugs is also approved for severe symptoms of Alzheimer's; and another drug is approved for use in moderate to severe forms of the disease.