I Missed the Early Signs of Dementia in my Mother

Looking back, there is little doubt in my mind I should have realized my mother was suffering from dementia sooner. Sadly, I didn't have the proper education, information, or frame of reference. Most people tend to ignore the early symptoms of the disease believing they are simply signs of "old age". Anyone who ends up in my shoes knows and understands that a person in the early stages of Alzheimer’s can function normally--even drive a car. Only when they deteriorate or some "event" takes place do we wake up to reality.

Sometimes these changes can be quite subtle but if detected raise a “red flag”. Behavior changes slowly in the elderly and as they begin to suffer cognitive impairment these changes are hard to detect.

If my mother had been enrolled in any of the studies listed below, I feel certain she would have been diagnosed sooner. This would have allowed me to get her in an exercise program, get her proper nutrition, and insured that she was taking her medication as prescribed. I learned in the last four years how important these factors are in the quality of her life.

The woman in the picture is my 91 year old mother (yes the picture is current). She suffers from Alzheimer’s disease. I am her CareGiver.

Sensors could help catch first signs of dementia
Monitors and online tests track subtle changes in daily mobility, behavior

Source Associated Press and MSNBC

WASHINGTON - Tiny motion sensors are attached to the walls, doorways and even the refrigerator of Elaine Bloomquist’s home, tracking the seemingly healthy 86-year-old’s daily activity.

It’s like spying in the name of science — with her permission — to see if round-the-clock tracking of elderly people’s movements can provide early clues of impending Alzheimer’s disease.

“Now it takes years to determine if someone’s developing dementia,” laments Dr. Jeffrey Kaye of Oregon Health & Science University, which is placing the monitors in 300 homes of Portland-area octogenarians as part of a $7 million federally funded project.

The goal: Shave off that time by spotting subtle changes in mobility and behavior that Alzheimer’s specialists are convinced precede the disease’s telltale memory loss.

Simple early signs

Early predictors may be as simple as variations in speed while people walk their hallways, or getting slower at dressing or typing. Also under study are in-home interactive “kiosks” that administer monthly memory and cognition tests, computer keyboards bugged to track typing speed, and pill boxes that record when seniors forget to take their medicines.

More than 5 million Americans, and 26 million people worldwide, have Alzheimer’s, and cases are projected to skyrocket as the population ages. Today’s medications only temporarily alleviate symptoms. Researchers are desperately hunting new ones that might at least slow the relentless brain decay if taken very early in the disease, before serious memory problems become obvious.

So dozens of early diagnosis methods also are under study, from tests of blood and spinal fluid to MRI scans of people’s brains. Even if some pan out, they’re expensive tests that would require lots of doctor intervention, when getting someone to visit a physician for suspicion of dementia is a huge hurdle. And during routine checkups, even doctors easily can miss the signs.

Bloomquist, of Milwaukie, Ore., knows the conundrum all too well. She volunteered for Kaye’s research because her husband died of Alzheimer’s, as did his parents and her own mother.

“It’s hard to know when people begin Alzheimer’s,” she reflects. “Alzheimer people do very well socially for short periods of time. If it’s just a casual conversation, they rise to the occasion.”

‘Typical’ days monitored

Measuring how people fare at home — on bad days as well as good ones, not just when they’re doing their best for the doctor — may spot changes that signal someone’s at high risk long before they’re actually demented, Kaye told the Alzheimer’s Association’s international dementia-prevention meeting last week.

“If you only assess them every once-in-a-blue-moon, you really are at a loss to know what they are like on a typical day,” Kaye explains.

High-tech monitors under study:

Researchers at New York’s Mount Sinai School of Medicine are heading a study that ultimately plans to recruit 600 people over age 75 to help test in-home “kiosks” that turn on automatically to administer monthly cognitive exams. A video of a smiling scientist appears on-screen to talk participants through such classic tests as reading a string of words and then, minutes later, repeating how many they recall, or seeing how quickly they complete connect-the-dot patterns.
An Oregon pilot study of the motion sensors tracked 14 participants in their upper 80s for almost a year. Half had “mild cognitive impairment,” an Alzheimer’s precursor, and half were healthy. Impaired participants showed much greater variation in such day-to-day activities as walking speed, especially in the afternoons.

Why? The theory is that as Alzheimer’s begins destroying brain cells, signals to nerves may become inconsistent — like static on a radio — well before memories become irretrievable. One day, signals to walk fire fine. The next, those signals are fuzzy and people hesitate, creating wildly varying activity patterns.

Study receives unique grant

The pilot study prompted a first-of-its-kind grant from the National Institutes of Health to extend the monitoring study to 300 homes; 112 are being monitored already, mostly in retirement communities like Bloomquist’s. They’re given weekly health questionnaires to make sure an injury or other illness that affects activity doesn’t skew the results.

In addition, participants receive computer training so they can play brain-targeted computer games and take online memory and cognition tests. The keyboards are rigged to let researchers track changes in typing speed and Internet use that could indicate confusion.

Finally, a souped-up pill dispenser called the MedTracker is added to some of the studies, wirelessly recording when drugs are forgotten or taken late.
Electronics giants already sell various medical warning technologies for the elderly, including dementia patients, such as pill boxes that sound reminder alarms at dose time. And the Alzheimer’s Association and Intel Corp. are jointly funding research into how to use television, cell phones and other everyday technology to do such things as guide dementia patients through daily activities.

The next step of companies selling early symptom monitoring isn’t far off, and unbiased data on what really helps will be crucial, Kaye warns.

The 36-Hour Day: A Family Guide to Caring for People with Alzheimer Disease and Memory Loss in Later Life

Lame Ducks in Bali

clipped from blogs.wsj.com Frustration with U.S. negotiating tactics at the climate conference burst wide open Thursday, with countries from Germany to Tuvalu blaming the U.S. for torpedoing a new climate-change deal. Europeans have threatened to skip the U.S.-sponsored global warming fest in Hawaii in January in retaliation for the slow-go tactics of U.S. negotiators. But another crew of Americans, skippered by Al Gore, Michael Bloomberg, and John Kerry, are getting a hero’s welcome. “People are turning away from the official delegation and they’re starting to face toward the future,” he says. They can’t afford to wait around for the next president.” America’s official negotiators are seen as an increasingly irrelevant nuisance International frustration peaked after the U.S. team blocked language that would establish concrete targets for greenhouse-gas reductions. Sen. Kerry promised the U.S. would take the lead fighting climate change — eventually.

The Housing Bubble

The chart on House-Price-to-Rental Ratio is one of the best illustrations I have seen of the current housing bubble. In many places it is now substantially cheaper to rent then own. In fact, in many places the cost of ownership is more then 150 percent of the cost of renting after calculating in the tax benefits.

Comments?

clipped from online.wsj.com HOME OWNERSHIP U.S. home ownership rates from 1900 through the current year HOUSE PRICE-TO-RENTAL RATIO Reflecting the booming real-estate market since 2000, the ratio of home prices to rent expenditures has risen sharply. Ratio of OFHEO house price index to personal consumption expenditures on rent Source: Congressional Budget Office; Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight; Department of Commerce, Bureau of Economic Analysis COMMERCIAL PAPER Earlier this year, many mortgage-backed assets held by SIVs went bad suddenly. Assets could be downgraded from top to bottom overnight. Asset prices stop falling when markets conclude that all the bad news has been factored in. Overnight commercial paper interest rates, daily through Nov. 20, 2007 PRICES OF SUBRPRIME MORTGAGE TRANCHES Source: Markit ABX.HE index published by Markit

A New Way for Doctors to Get Sued?

I would be interested in hearing comments to this one.

clipped from blogs.wsj.com A man taking several prescription drugs passes out at the wheel, drives off the road and hits and kills a 10-year-old boy. Can the boy’s mother sue the doctor who prescribed the drugs? The answer is yes at least according to a ruling made yesterday by Massachusetts’s Supreme Judicial Court, reported in the Boston Globe. The mother’s lawyers allege that the doc failed to warn his patient about the side effects of the medications and the potential danger of driving while taking them. The patient was reportedly 75 years old and had emphysema, high blood pressure and metastatic lung cancer. He had prescriptions from his doctor for a handful of drugs whose side effects include drowsiness, dizziness, and fainting He reported no side effects in the months before his accident In a dissent, Justice Robert J. Cordy wrote that the ruling “introduces a new audience to which the physician must attend — everyone who might come in contact with the patient.”

Straight Dope on Baseball’s Drug Problem

The complete Q and A is available at the source site. The Health Blog.

clipped from blogs.wsj.com If you’re ever going to talk to the guy who wrote a book called Performance-Enhancing Substances in Sports and Exercise, today’s the day. As the clock ticked on the release of the big Mitchell report on doping in baseball, the Health Blog managed to get Charles Yesalis on the phone. Yesalis, a professor emeritus of health and human development at Penn State, has been studying doping in sports for years. Here are the highlights of our conversation. How did performance-enhancing drugs get into baseball? It goes back to World War II. Immediately afterward, professional baseball players who served in the Army brought back amphetamines. It was absolutely rampant. It was mainly to deal with the long season — the mental wear and tear. It was also to help them recuperate from hard nights on the town. I think stimulants are clearly still involved as a significant aspect of the game. What about steroids? How much benefit does an athlete need from a drug to improve performance?

Financial Ties to Parents and Children Affect Boomer Retirement

This was extracted from a good and interesting blog-- Sometimes I Feel Like a Piece of Bologna. This blog is worth visiting and adding to the reader.

clipped from generationsandwich.blogspot.com Boomers, though arguably the most prosperous generation in American history, face mounting demands on their financial resources from both their adult children and their aging parents. In fact, one in six Boomers surveyed is "sandwiched," providing assistance to both their parents and adult children, according to Ameriprise Financial’s Money Across Generations study. Boomers are torn between helping their adult children pay off debts and get started, and helping their aging parents with necessities. This help often comes at the expense of funding their own retirement. My husband and I have very different perspectives on this. His parents provided everything for him through college, and were generous until their deaths. My parents provided nothing. I paid for college, grad school, and all expenses from junior high forward. Yes, it was very hard and I missed out on a lot. But I learned to be independent and make my own way. Sometimes I Feel Like a Piece of Bologna

Scientists: Arctic Is Screaming; Global Warming May Have Passed Tipping Point

clipped from www.foxnews.com An already relentless melting of the Arctic greatly accelerated this summer, a warning sign that some scientists worry could mean global warming has passed an ominous tipping point. One even speculated that summer sea ice would be gone in five years. Greenland's ice sheet melted nearly 19 billion tons more than the previous high mark, and the volume of Arctic sea ice at summer's end was half what it was just four years earlier, according to new NASA satellite data 2007 shattered records for Arctic melt in the following ways: 552 billion tons of ice melted this summer from the Greenland ice sheet A record amount of surface ice was lost over Greenland this year Alaska's frozen permafrost is warming White sea ice reflects about 80 percent of the sun's heat off Earth Earth has hit one of his so-called tipping points "At this rate, the Arctic Ocean could be nearly ice-free at the end of summer by 2012, much faster than previous predictions."

Democracy?

clipped from blogs.wsj.com Since the U.S. invasion in 2003, women have faced more restrictions as the formerly secular Iraq becomes religious. Few women leave their hair uncovered in Baghdad. Women’s activists fear women will suffer if the new constitution eventually allows individuals to decide domestic issues according to Islamic religious traditions. Policewomen in Iraq have been told to hand in their guns, in the latest sign of cultural and religious conservatism taking hold in the country, reports the Los Angeles Times’s Tina Susman. Most of the few policewomen who worked in street patrols have been reassigned to desk jobs. Gen. Phillips says when he questioned Iraqi Interior Ministry officials about the diminishing role of women in the force, he was told, “Females are taken care of by men in this country.”

Who's decorating the trees on the Garden State Parkway?

Maybe more people should be doing this.

clipped from blogs.usatoday.com Someone is trying to spread a little Christmas cheer along New Jersey's Garden State Parkway. The AP reports that just after Thanksgiving, two large glass ornaments mysteriously appeared on two large pine trees alongside the Parkway in New Jersey's Pinelands. Since then, five more decorations have popped up in the same house-free area. "Somebody has a lot of holiday spirit, which is great, but a lot of spare time at night, which is not so great," Joseph Orlando, a spokesman for the New Jersey Turnpike Authority, told the AP. The authority operates the 173-mile toll road, which traverses the state and cuts through 50 municipal areas. No one has taken responsibility for the ornaments. "It's a mystery to us," State Police Capt. Al Della Fave told the AP. (Photo by Mel Evans, AP)

Billion Dollar Loogie

clipped from blogs.wsj.com Sure, the walking, talking gob of phlegm (pictured) was genius. But it was a clever intellectual property strategy that made that loogie worth $2.3 billion. That’s how much British conglomerate Reckitt Benckiser just agreed to pay for Adams Respiratory Therapeutics, the maker of the cough medicine Mucinex (and sponsor of the Mr. Mucus ads). Guaifenesin, the active ingredient in Mucinex, is a medicine that’s about as old as the hills. But Adams was the first company to do clinical trials to prove to the FDA that the long-acting form of the drug is safe and effective. That meant it got exclusive rights to that formulation — which was enough to get the FDA to bump a bunch of generic versions off the market. And congested consumers, happy to take their medicine less often, snapped up Mucinex.

What’s in a Name?

Would you think about this before naming your kid?

clipped from blogs.wsj.com In this week’s print column, I analyze a study that links people’s initials to surprising trends. For example, major league baseball players with first or last initial K were more likely than average to strike out; and business graduate students with initials C or D had lower grades, on average earlier research exploring this link between our names and our taste — in brand names, in hometowns (Louis prefers St. Louis, Jack likes Jacksonville), and in street names. clipped from blog.newsweek.com People like their names so much that they unconsciously opt for things that begin with their initials. Even weirder, they gravitate toward things that begin with their initials even when those things are undesirable, like bad grades or a baseball strikeout. The pattern held for grades, too. Using 15 years (1990–2004) of grade point averages for business school grads, they found that students whose names began with C or D earned lower GPAs than those whose names began with A or B. clipped from papers.ssrn.com Moniker Maladies: When Names Sabotage Success

Nearly 20,000 Downgrades — and Counting

clipped from blogs.wsj.com The tsunami of subprime-related bond downgrades this quarter sent shockwaves throughout the financial markets. Now that the tide has weakened, analysts are surveying the wreckage. According to research from Deutsche Bank, credit rating companies Moody’s Investors Service, Standard & Poor’s and Fitch Ratings have issued an unprecedented 19,795 debt downgrades so far this year among securitized assets. That compares with the 2,539 separate downgrades they issued for all of 2006, and the previous annual record for downgrades, which was 4,168 in 2003. The percentage of subprime-mortgage-backed debt affected by downgrades is much higher – for example, 58% of collateralized debt obligations backed by subprime collateral that were issued from 2005 to 2007 have been downgraded “Even more alarming is the degree to which very highly rated securities seem to have deteriorated overnight some securities issued by collateralized debt obligations had their ratings slashes from triple-A to “distressed”

The Subprime Bailout Bonanza

clipped from blogs.wsj.com And so it begins. The bailout to end all bailouts government involvement in the markets on a level not seen since the resolution of the S&L crisis Lehman Brothers expects about 2.8 million subprime mortgages to reset in 2008 and 2009 about 30% higher The questions that remain is whether intervention in these markets will produce an solution that will enhance the value of the vast supply of mortgages “The cost of this is, actually, going to be absorbed by investors in mortgage-backed securities,” they write. “This is why ‘good credit’ borrowers are not going to be ‘rewarded’ — because investors cannot be brought to forgo that much interest.” The double-A rated ABX was traded at 39.8 cents on the dollar this morning, as investors still see very little value being recovered from those loans.

Bridezilla Back, Sued Florist

Everybody gets 15 minutes.

clipped from blogs.wsj.com Lawyer Bride Who Sued Her Florist Elana Glatt et al. v. Posy Floral Design Studio sued the florist after she was displeased with how things turned out. (Click here and here for Law Blog Background.) she goes by Elana Elbogen, her maiden name click here for pages 4 through 11 of the answer click here for the 19-page complaint in full. highlights: groom-to-be allegedly had no involvement in the floral arrangements! Glatt and her future mother-in-law allegedly disagreed on the floral arrangements! “ Herbert Glatt, MD, the father of the groom, allegedly paid for the flowers Elana and her future mother-in-law made so many last-minute changes even “up until the final few hours of the latest possible date that Posy Designs was able to place flower orders for Plaintiff’s wedding event that were known and expected to be imported directly from Holland.” The florists asked for sanctions against Glatt for filing a frivolous and malevolent lawsuit.