Patti's Blog - Advocate for Elders, People with Disabilities and Their Families

Prolonging quality of life for Alzheimer’s patients

Excerpt from: NBC News (click for full article)

 

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Alzheimer's 'Epidemic' Now A Deadlier Threat To Elderly

Excerpt from: NPR (click for full article)

 

Alzheimer's disease doesn't just steal memories. It takes lives.

The disease is now the sixth leading cause of death in the U.S., and figures released Tuesday by the Alzheimer's Association show that deaths from the disease increased by 68 percent between 2000 and 2010.

"It's an epidemic, it's on the rise, and currently [there is] no way to delay it, prevent it or cure it," says Maria Carrillo, a neuroscientist with the Alzheimer's Association. More than 5 million people in the U.S. have the disease, she says, and that number could reach nearly 14 million by 2050.

Report: 1 in 3 seniors dies with, not of, dementia

Excerpt from: The Oakland Press (click for full article)

 

A staggering 1 in 3 seniors dies with Alzheimer's disease or other types of dementia, says a new report that highlights the impact the mind-destroying disease is having on the rapidly aging population.

Dying with Alzheimer's is not the same as dying from it. But even when dementia isn't the direct cause of death, it can be the final blow — speeding someone's decline by interfering with their care for heart disease, cancer or other serious illnesses. That's the assessment of the report released Tuesday by the Alzheimer's Association, which advocates for more research and support for families afflicted by it.

"Exacerbated aging," is how Dr. Maria Carrillo, an association vice president, terms the Alzheimer's effect. "It changes any health care situation for a family."

 

Middle-aged aerobics and older brains

Excerpt from: HHS.gov (click for full article)

 

A study indicates that people who stay aerobically fit in middle age might be less likely to develop dementia later. At the Cooper Institute in Dallas, researchers saw this in 24 years of data on about 20,000 people. Researcher Laura DeFina:

“With increasing cardiorespiratory fitness levels, there was decreased development of all-cause dementia in later life.”

For instance, people in the fittest 20 percent around age 50 were 36 percent less likely than those in the least-fit 20 percent to be diagnosed with dementia after age 65.

DeFina notes other studies have found better blood flow in brains of fitter people.

The report in Annals of Internal Medicine was supported by the National Institutes of Health.

Families fight dementia unit closure

Excerpt from: UTV (click for full article)

 

 

How Chronic Stress Accelerates Alzheimer’s Disease

Excerpt from: Science Daily (click for full article)

 

Why does chronic stress lead to increased risk for dementia? The answer may lie in the elevation of stress steroids that is seen in the brain during stress, Sara K. Bengtsson suggests in the thesis she is defending at Umeå University in Sweden on March 22nd.

These stress steroids can inhibit the general brain activity. Allopregnanolon is one of them, and the doctoral thesis shows that chronically elevated levels of allopregnanolone accelerated the disease development in two transgenic Alzheimer disease models. The Alzheimer mice responded with impaired learning and memory. They had also increased brain levels of beta-amyloids, i.e. the proteins that form plaques in Alzheimer's disease.

The thesis also demonstrates that high levels of beta-amyloids corresponded to dysfunction among brain synapses. This was seen after a period of chronically elevated levels of allopregnanolon, but not after placebo treatment. The effects were identified early in the disease development when the animals normally have intact memory function. A similar acceleration of AD in humans could mean the difference between living self-sufficiently at home and living with requirements of professional care.

Dementia Can Occur in Young Age as Well

Excerpt from: Top News (click for full article)

 

In general, dementia is considered as elderly disease. This is the reason that young and middle-aged people do not associate themselves with neurodegenerative disease.

Similar thing happened with Kate Swaffer who got diagnosed with dementia at the age of 54. Swaffer shared that she was unable to believe doctor who told her that she was suffering from dementia. It took a lot of time for her to seep in the fact that she was down with dementia.

She still remembers that she used to cry a lot. A report taken out by the Alzheimer's Australia national summit also shows that it gets very difficult for considerably young people to accept the news of dementia.

There are a number of difficulties which they have to face, some being misdiagnosis, social challenges, suspension from job and lack of services to cure the problem.

Frisky Alzheimer's residents: 'ew' or 'aw'?

Excerpt from: McKnight's (click for full article)

 

Alzheimer's disease is very good at taking. It takes away memories. It takes away personalities. It can be argued that Alzheimer's essentially takes away a person's essence.

And as almost anyone who has spent time in a senior living facility can tell you, it can also take away sexual inhibitions. Clinicians have a fancy term for this development: hypersexual behavior. Up to 17% of people with dementia opt for this particular form of personal expression, according to published reports.

In senior care settings, it can be seen in obvious and subtle ways: jealous accusations that a spouse is being unfaithful, sexual overtures to staff or other residents, extramarital relationships and even public masturbation.

Other less extreme examples include vulgar/obscene language, publicly exposing oneself and other forms of another fancy term: disinhibition. All of these behaviors can raise awkward issues.

Which gives long-term care operators a new twist to deal with. One helpful book on this subject is Sexuality and Long-Term Care by Gayle Doll. One of its features is helping facilities examine policies around relationships and sexual behavior. Major concerns include avoiding any sexual exploitation, abuse or assault and determining the individuals' ability to give meaningful consent.

Sleep Loss Precedes Alzheimer’s Symptoms

Excerpt from: Alzheimer's Reading Room (click for full article)

 

Sleep is disrupted in people who likely have early Alzheimer’s disease but do not yet have the memory loss or other cognitive problems characteristic of full-blown disease, researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis in JAMA Neurology.

The finding confirms earlier observations by some of the same researchers. Those studies showed a link in mice between sleep loss and brain plaques, a hallmark of Alzheimer’s disease. Early evidence tentatively suggests the connection may work in both directions: Alzheimer’s plaques disrupt sleep, and lack of sleep promotes Alzheimer’s plaques.

“This link may provide us with an easily detectable sign of Alzheimer’s pathology,” says senior author David M. Holtzman, MD, the Andrew B. and Gretchen P. Jones Professor and head of Washington University’s Department of Neurology. “As we start to treat people who have markers of early Alzheimer’s, changes in sleep in response to treatments may serve as an indicator of whether the new treatments are succeeding.”

Alzheimer's drug add-on brings some memory improvement

Excerpt from: Los Angeles Times (click for full article)

 

In patients with moderate Alzheimer's disease, an experimental drug that alters the brain's "fight or flight" impulse succeeded in improving memory modestly when it was added to at least one of the medications already in wide use to treat the memory-robbing disease.

Compared with subjects taking the drug memantine and a placebo, subjects supplementing their customary drug regimen for three months with the experimental drug--ORM-12741--scored more highly on two measures of memory. One of those tested the quality of patients' memory overall; the other tested the quality of patients' "episodic memory"--the ability to recall events and experiences from one's own past.

In subjects taking the lower of the two doses tested, researchers at Finnish drug developer Orion Pharmaceuticals found a slight improvement in working memory--the ability to hold several items in memory for a minute or two. But the benefits were too small to be reliably attributed to the drug.