Alzheimer’s

Keeping a Good Attitude in the Face of a Bad Diagnosis

authorcarolshepley Leave a comment

It has been a tough week. I took my mother to the Memory and Aging Project at Washington University hoping to hear that her short-term memory problems were the result of stroke. After testing her for two hours, Dr. John Morris concluded that this was not the case. He diagnosed her with Alzheimer’s. My father had Alzheimer’s for eleven years, and his end was terrible. He was a very good man and did not deserve to suffer the way he did. The prospect of seeing the same disease through with my mother has been a blow.

After crying a lot, I turned to what I have learned from Lori Patin. When she received her diagnosis, Lori said “I felt like I just wanted to sit in a corner and cry until I died.” Then at a Parkinson’s conference, she heard a neurologist say that no one ever died from Parkinson’s. It turned her life around. She realized: “I’ve got time! I don’t have to let this disease control my life. I can make the best of my life. I can choose to not let this get to me. And, if it does, then I can figure out another way to fight. And another way after that. I can beat this.”

I know we can’t beat Alzheimer’s, but we can make the best of it. My mother has started on Aricept, a drug that should keep her in the early stages of A.D. for two to three years. The early stages are not so bad. Mom has very little short-term memory, but she is there in the present. She is herself. She remembers us and has her personality. She is happy and full of love. She is glad to be alive. We can’t beat this disease, but we can enjoy the present, Mom’s present and our life with her.

Attitude is everything. Mom was a Christian Scientist for a while as a teenager and retains that spirit of thinking positively. No matter what happens she thinks of it in the best way. She takes a positive outlook toward her condition, and I will too. Like Lori, I won’t let this disease control our lives. Mom and I will make the best of our lives. As Lori says, “keep in mind that this is the one life you have and decide to make the best of it.”Memory and Aging

Research Shows Being Bilingual Forestalls Alzheimer’s

authorcarolshepley Leave a comment

This week I had a wonderful almost-surprise visit from a friend named Sandy Disner who is a professor of linguistics at USC. On the way to the airport we started talking about language acquisition in children. Just as we reached the drop-off point, Sandy told me that research shows being bilingual forestalls Alzheimer’s four years. With my family history – a father who had Alzheimer’s and a mother with dementia, I got really interested and texted her later to find out the name of the researcher.

Canadian neuroscientist Ellen Bialystock used MRIs to study older, bilingual adults in various stages of Alzheimer’s. In an article in the Manchester Guardian Alzheimer'sBialystock reports, “We did a study at the Baycrest geriatric centre in Toronto in which we identified 200 clear cases of Alzheimer’s disease and looked at the patients’ backgrounds to see if they were mono- or bilingual. Then we looked at how old they were when the family noticed something was wrong and when they were formally diagnosed. In both cases the bilinguals were significantly older, by about four years.” She goes on to say, “We did a second study with 20 monolinguals and 20 bilinguals, all about 75 years old. They had all been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, and they were at exactly the same cognitive level, so you would expect them to have the same level of damage in the medial-temporal cortex. But when we looked at their brains, we found that the bilinguals had significantly more damage than the monolinguals. They had more advanced Alzheimer’s but they were functioning at the same level. That’s the advantage: they could cope with the disease better.”

Not all of us have the opportunity to be bilingual, but Bialystock goes on to say that this research suggests that learning a language late in life is probably beneficial “not because of bilingualism but because learning a language is a stimulating mental activity and a good way to exercise your brain.”

It is exciting to learn that there are things you can do to slow the process of dementia taking over your brain. Lori Patin knows this intuitively and is fighting back. Parkinson’s can cause dementia as the disease progresses, but she is doing everything she can to prevent that from happening. While she exercises her body four hours a day, she also does regular brain workouts. She plays bridge twice a week because this card game requires you to remember all the cards that are played. Just as she strengthens her muscle by lifting weights, she improves her mental capacity by playing bridge and other games that require memorization.