The behaviors of seniors with Alzheimer’s are often unpredictable. You may have already experienced a wide swing in your loved one from withdrawn to aggressive. Dealing with these behaviors is never easy, especially as they sometimes come out of the blue. But that’s Alzheimer’s.
We’ll look at some common behaviors and ways you can respond to limit your frustration and to increase the wellness of your loved one.
A neurologist and director of the Center for Cognitive Health at Mount Sinai Hospital, Gandy specializes in the study and treatment of dementia, focusing on Alzheimer’s disease. He has been working in the field for 25 years.
Dementia advocates are urging the province to do more for people with the disease after a man with Alzheimer’s went missing for five days, leaving a nursing home in Stephenville and then travelling to New Brunswick. The man was found safe in Saint John.
We cannot rely on medical advances to solve the problem of dementia. The few drugs that help stave off the disease have limited effectiveness and new drugs will take decades to develop.
If there was a way to know if you were predisposed to developing Alzheimer’s disease, would you want to know? As tests to evaluate an individual’s risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease advance, this is a question plaguing the minds of more and more Americans, especially those who have parents or other relatives with the disease.
According to the Washington Post, two-thirds of U.S. respondents in a survey last year conducted by the Harvard School of Public Health said they’d want to know if they were likely to develop Alzheimer’s disease.
“I know they say there is no cure for Alzheimer’s… But I was wondering if there’s any development in a cure you know about?” I was asked after my lecture on PET imaging of dementia this past summer. A number of technologists gathered around me, far more eager to hear my response to this question than they were to hear me speak on the continuing education topics.