Geriatric Care Management Blog

For those of you with a loved one who suffers from dementia of any sort, it is hard to see them fade in their ability to remember familiar surroundings, important experiences from the past or even remember you.  And as if that is not enough to manage as a caregiver, your loved one may also at times become inexplicably angry or aggressive.  So what can you do when dementia becomes violent? It is really critical that you always remember that the dementia is not about you, and it is not even really about the parent who once walked you to school, or down the aisle if you are married, or any of the countless other wonderful episodes in your collective life.  It is about the dementia and you cannot reason with it.   The Alzheimer’s Association, an organization founded to provide optimal care and services to individuals confronting dementia, and to their caregivers and families, offers some very helpful advice.  When you are with a person suffering from dementia, and they become aggressive...

What do hearing aids, exercise, support groups and travel have in common?  They all are ways that individuals suffering from Alzheimer’s Disease, specifically, or dementia, generally, can fight these diseases’ progression.  Even more important, they help to fight the personal isolation that accompanies these frightening conditions. We often associate dementias with older adults and the stereotypic confusion that can characterize the individuals with the diagnoses.  But it is not just a condition of older adults as the recent public disclosure of The University of Tennessee women’s basketball coach, Pat Summit, highlights.  Ms. Summit is just 59 as she goes public with her diagnosis, and it helps others to understand that it can happen as early as 30 and 40 years of age.  Younger onset Alzheimer’s Disease technically speaking is the manifestation affecting those under age 65, and there are 250,000 new cases in America every year.  Yet, there are ways to fight the downward spiral of dementia.

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I have written in earlier blog postings about dementia: “preventing” Alzheimer’s Disease, Alzheimer’s from the inside out,  maternal genetic links to Alzheimer’s, and women’s predisposition to Alzheimer’s.  I would like to share some research that shows dementia to be tied to a number of other chronic conditions we often find among the elderly.  This posting is about monitoring and managing other medical conditions in order to reduce the chances of developing dementia, and it underscores one of the most important parts of geriatric care management...

I have written in the past about some of the current knowledge on dementias that can affect elders for whom you may be caring.  But one thing we do not always talk about is how decisions made earlier in life can actually help to ward off failing memory function or actually mitigate the risk of dementia.  I am going to share here results from two separate studies that offer some hopeful information for those who wish to start right now in habits that will help to preserve a healthier, older brain later in life.

A group of researchers led by Kirk Erickson reported on the normal course of “brain shrinkage” with age in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.  The authors talked about the typical shrinkage of a part of the brain that affects spatial memory, the hippocampus.  They conducted a clinical study among 120 adults in which half of the adults were given a walking regimen...