Alzheimers Care

WASHINGTON — Elaine Vlieger is making some concessions to Alzheimer's. She's cut back on her driving, frozen dinners replace once elaborate cook...

I would like to share one small thing I have discovered with my mother, that's made a huge difference in how I feel about living so far from her.

We need a National Alzheimer's Plan that reflects the psychosocial/mental health needs of Americans with dementia and their families, and that creates opportunities for them to have a vastly improved quality of life.

In the fall of 2008, I wrote a screenplay I intended to film entirely in an Alzheimer's unit. After many weeks of rehearsals, I arrived at a troubling realization: I was not just making a challenging film -- I was making the wrong film.

What if a preeminent global health authority declared there's a public health "time bomb" among us? What if he were the person most responsible for leading the coalition that turned HIV/AIDS from a certain death sentence into a manageable illness?

When you reach the point where you're physically worn out and emotionally spent the majority of the time, stop and give some serious consideration to placing your loved one in a high-quality long-term care facility. It isn't a copout. It can be by far the most loving course of action.

There are four activities that can typically reach persons at all stages of Alzheimer's disease. Being visited by a child is one of them, as young Max discovered. Others include having a visit from a pet, listening to or playing music and observing or creating artwork.

There has been enormous attention of late to the grim and genuinely frightening problem of Alzheimer's disease. The problem is grim by its very nature -- there is little we contemplate with greater dread than the loss of our minds, our very selves.

In this new book on Alzheimer's prevention, Dr. Gary Small and his co-author (and spouse) Gigi Vorgan clearly lay out a plan to prevent, delay and diminish the symptoms of AD for those who are at risk, which is most of us if we live long enough.

My wife's 103-year-old grandmother lived in a third floor walk-up apartment in New York City. The exercise she got on those stairs and errands may not only have protected her heart so she could live past 100, it may also have protected her brain.

Today, too many families face President Reagan's "long goodbye" -- and too many Alzheimers' victims know, even as the disease begins to rob them of their memories, of the pain their families will face.

A woman with Alzheimer's may look at her elderly husband and not recognize him as her husband because he does not look 35 years old anymore. So if you were to play music from that time period it would speak to her current reality.

Support for Alzheimer's caregivers has mostly been in the form of information sharing, skills training, stress-management techniques, peer-support and behavior modification solutions. While important, these external interventions tend to not stick.