Read it here in the Washington Post: Alzheimer’s Researchers Hunt for New Tools to Identify Disease’s Onset.
Help for Alzheimer’s Patients
Here’s an interesting story in the New York Times about an innovative nursing home in Arizona, Beatitudes, that implements some unique treatment protocols based on new research related to the benefit of addressing the EMOTIONAL needs of the Alzheimer’s patient. This includes treatment protocols that soothe the soul: unlimited chocolate (better than Xanax!), baby dolls, and kindness.
They’ve also addressed some of the physical threats facing Alzheimer’s patients with some very unique solutions:
And Beatitudes installed a rectangle of black carpet in front of the dementia unit’s fourth-floor elevators because residents appear to interpret it as a cliff or hole, no longer darting into elevators and wandering away.
“They’ll walk right along the edge but don’t want to step in the black,” said Ms. Alonzo, who finds it less unsettling than methods some facilities use, bracelets that trigger alarms when residents exit. “People with dementia have visual-spatial problems. We’ve actually had some people so wary of it that when we have to get them on the elevator to take them somewhere, we put down a white towel or something to cover it up.”
The article is well worth your time; check it out here.
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Originally published elsewhere, 1/1/2011
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Is Exercise Brain-Protective? Evidence Mounts as Apparent Correlation Between Cognition and Gait Emerges
As we’re gathering together with friends and relatives, it’s always interesting to see how much–or how little–we’ve all changed in a year’s time. Some are blossoming as others fade. Children grow like weeds, voices lower, voices richen, some fall silent.
As a child, I was always fascinated by the adults in my circle. I had an extremely elderly, matriarchal and imposing great-grandmother whose light faded noticeably from year to year, to the point that once I had graduated from bibs she was relegated to them. Although I was quite small, I remember seeing her fed at the table one year and in her sickbed the next and then she disappeared altogether.
Remembering her this year, I thought about how apparent the decline had been, how no one was surprised as she made her transition from ruler to ruled one.
And I wondered if any of us has the ability to see this decline in ourselves, so we can actually DO SOMETHING before it overtakes us.
In my opinion, yes we can. And it’s the same old answer: STAY PHYSICALLY ACTIVE.
Here is a terrific analysis of the issue from a July 2012 New York Times article by Pam Belluck: Footprints to Cognitive Decline and Alzheimer’s are Seen in Gait.
Pam Belluck (@PamBelluck) does a masterful job detailing some studies performed in Basel, Switzerland that yielded some surprisingly simple diagnostic tools that can help reveal impending cognitive decline. In my own opinion, I think this also reveals an opportunity to some to “reinforce their wiring.”
Read the article and you’ll see what I mean. Be sure to watch the attached short video clip that shows a woman walking, then walking while counting backward by two’s; a picture is worth a thousand words.
Enjoy the holidays (and especially that vital after-dinner walk)!