It's not a day of learning. It's day after day of being frightened by unfamiliar surroundings, not knowing why you are so old and feeble, and being afraid that everyone around you is trying to hurt you. The paranoia and distrust and bitterness that comes with the disease is just as bad as the memory loss itself. All of that hardship drags down entire families and can stress old friendships to the breaking point. Alzheimer's is a frightening and cruel disease.
The paranoia and distrust and bitterness that comes with the disease is just as bad as the memory loss itself.
I've known three people so far with Alzheimer's: My grandmother, my grandfather, and my mother-in-law.
My observation is that Alzheimer's definitely shifts your personality, but which direction it goes in is not obvious. My grandma ended up paranoid and distrustful. My grandfather remained cheerful and smiling right up to the end. (Neither of them actually died of Alzheimer's.) My mother-in-law is also fairly far over toward the good-cheer side.
It is tempting to observe that Alzheimer's tends to exaggerate an existing aspect of your personality: My grandmother was always paranoid and became more so; my grandfather was always fairly cheerful and outgoing. But some of that may be due to environmental factors: an Alzheimer's patient surrounded by familiar, friendly people and things is naturally likely to be happier. When you've got Alzheimer's, the influence of environment gets larger and larger, since it's your only possible source of continuity. That's what this awesome bus stop hack is exploiting.
emphasis on "I hope" ... it is a frightening disease my grand father has it; I think sometimes its our reaction to him forgetting us that makes him scared.. perhaps if we just re introduced ourselves
I've cared for several grandparents as they went through the stages of the disease. In one case there was severe paranoia and distrust. In the other it was the daily unfamiliarity which was frightening to her. In the end introductions lasted only minutes. The best we can do right now is to show love and care as they go through these trials. All I can say is to be strong, and remember the good times when life wears thin.
In the late stages patients tend to be stuck in a fog of anger, confusion, and sadness. Just don't forget that even without a cure, most people don't ever develop Alzheimer's. Prevalence at age 85 is about 25%, and only 1% at age 60. And there are plenty of things you can do now to reduce your risk even further.
Evidence is still inconclusive on a lot of things, but my list is:
#1. Keep your mind active as much as possible. Waste time by working puzzles instead of reading People magazine. Constantly learn new things whether they're useful or not, both inside and outside your domain of expertise. This approach has the most proven benefits and no known drawbacks.
#2. Lean toward a Mediterranean diet and drink a glass of red wine every evening. I don't think there's any need to be anal about it, but just avoid Atkins-like diets, take the fish option if one is available, etc.
#3. Stay physically active as much as possible. If you live in a walkable neighborhood, you're halfway there with no effort.
#4. Drink up to a cup of coffee a day. Also strongly implicated in improving prostate and kidney health, but may have cardiovascular disadvantages.
#5. Take B vitamins. I started with the widely-available "B-50" complex and moved up to "B-100" with an additional folate supplement to get to a total of 200% US RDA of folate. Evidence is sketchy about long-term benefits, but I find the effect to be similar to a cup of coffee without the crash or the jitters, so I'm sticking with it for that reason alone.
Two family members lost their minds slowly, until they became walking ghosts, nothing left but meat. I've been horrified. They were heavily doped with drugs even though they were well over 80 years old. 70 strikes me as an arbitrary boundary after which I'd rather die if I am to, than torture my family and my society around me with my presence.
In a less interventional medicine system, my elder relatives would have been diagnosed "old age" instead of some obscure illness and left to themselves to die earlier (oh horrors!), sparing everyone and themselves from the tragedy of the mind dying and the body not dying.
I was thinking about that the other day -- it's an anti-inflammatory drug that seems to work immediately on many patients diagnosed with Alzheimer's. Why?
Apparently it's difficult to tell the difference between Alzheimer's and vascular dementia while the patient is still alive -- examining a sample of brain tissue is the definitive test. I think I heard that the misdiagnosis rate is something like 50% (unreliable number, don't take my word for it). It doesn't make much sense for an anti-inflammatory drug to clear the protein plaques or undo neurological damage in the case of Alzheimer's disease, but it does make sense for the drug to improve blood flow to the brain for patients who actually have vascular dementia instead. So, perhaps there was a mix of patients in the (small) initial trials we've seen for etanercept as an Alzheimer's treatment that accounts for the surprising result.
Last I heard (a few months ago maybe?) there had only really been tried/injected into one fellow who did have that kind of result. Has their been some larger scale trials that make this promising case sound like a likely cure?
