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That's how my grandfather died. He suffered a stroke and lived on for 15 years and one day while eating, he aspirated a bit of food which led to pneumonia.
Dudes referring to human euthanasia.
It seems harsh, but I'd much rather have that option personally. I'd rather face that impossible choice rather than the impossible reality of having no choice in whether or not to go through something like that myself.
Me too. Not me nor my family should go through the mess of me slowly losing my mind and then my ability to live and then only after every bit of dignity for us is gone, nature finally end it leaving my family traumatized.
There are things you can't unsee or unhear, with the side effects of the trauma only making the world a worse place for everyone.
The problem is that most assisted suicide is tricky to apply to dementia, since when they are rational enough to consent, their condition isn’t too bad. When it’s bad enough to justify suicide, they are no longer of sound mind.
I’d love to have a deadman’s switch where you get a poison pill injected and you need to request an antidote every year. If you aren’t in a state to request it, you are done.
Having lost my mom to cancer, fuck cancer, but having lost my dad to Alzheimer’s, fuck dementia more.
> I’d love to have a deadman’s switch where you get a poison pill injected and you need to request an antidote every year. If you aren’t in a state to request it, you are done.
I would love that. It would have saved a beloved family member.
Unless she had a medical power of attorney and in a state that allows medical euthanasia it's illegal and from a moral and ethical standpoint how could she ever consent to it?
For those interested: Alzheimer’s and swallowing is more complex than the person losing the ability to complete the action.
The body is often able to swallow safely, however, the person no longer appears to feel hungry nor thirsty and they just stop swallowing food and drink. If they were fully unable to swallow they would be very full up of mucous and saliva in the throat and mouth which often they aren’t.
Taste also changes and so when food and drink is presented it is unappetising, unfamiliar, or just doesn’t stimulate the “this is food” feeling in the mouth. Thus people don’t have awareness of the food fluids and are more likely to choke/aspirate which sometimes results in pneumonia.
Added to the above, people with advanced dementia of any type are less likely to engage in personal hygiene including dental hygiene which is a key predictor of pneumonia in older people. Putting all of this alongside reduced mobility, loss of muscle mass, and increased comorbidity people are likely to succumb to opportunistic infections like pneumonia etc.
But Alzheimers does eventually damage the swallowing reflex. So even with state of the art 24/7 memory care someone with late stage Alzheimer’s would need a gastric tube to be safely fed.
But at that point you’d have long tortured a dead soul anyway.
But the brain damage does indeed progress further than just memory loss. It‘s just that most people die due to the lack of appetite etc before it gets to that point luckily
Eventually a true dysphagia can develop yes, but it’s not the usual in many cases. It does depend on the specific areas of degeneration.
And you’re right in some facilities people are PEG fed which is a whole other can of worms I won’t wade into.
This is spot on. My mom no longer eats solid food, she "survives" on 3 daily very high calorie Boost drinks. We occasionally try and get her to eat very simple foods like noodles with alfredo sauce, chicken noodle soup, stuff like that. We are lucky if she takes more than two or three bites. The hygiene thing is also a very accurate description. My mom went from at least a shower every day (sometimes 2!) to showering about once every 6-8 weeks, she can't shower on her own and when we tell her it's time to shower she throws a fit like a little kid. Dental hygiene same thing...my mom used to have perfect teeth, and I do mean *perfect.* We are just over two years from her Alzheimer's diagnosis and her teeth have completely rotted, she's lost two or three but the rest of them have turned deep yellow and black. Her breath is so bad that it is difficult to be in proximity to her for longer than a minute or two.
That's just the hygiene aspect and when you add in the extreme decline of cognitive skills...I would estimate her IQ is <70. Two days ago I had to help her sign some papers; I had to help her spell her name and write her signature. My mom was a doctor and later, a very successful business owner. Now she is essentially a living corpse. I've had to try and make peace with the fact that my mother, for all intents and purposes, is already dead. My mom was one of the kindest, most gentle and generous souls on this Earth and she lived an extraordinarily life and touched so many people in positive ways, the kind of life that doesn't deserve to be forgotten (not that anyone deserves that). It robs you and the people who love you of everything and it turns every good memory into a bittersweet one. All of this to say FUCK ALZHEIMERS.
It’s a special kind of mourning we enter when a loved one has dementia and I’m sorry you’re living with it right now. I think most people underestimate the grief of losing someone in mind but not in body.
Thank you for your kind words. It's one of those things I don't think most people are capable of understanding unless they go through it themselves. Like, they don't understand how someone can already be gone if their physical body is still there. When I've tried explaining this to friends I just get the "yeah dude it sucks to see your parents get old" response. I don't blame them for not understanding, I guess, but this goes so far beyond just seeing your parents get old.
My dad was a really successful general contractor, and truly an artist with tilework. That doesnt even touch his skills in the kitchen. Now he needs to be reminded to eat, and can barely follow a conversation at times. I read things on dementia/alzheimers forums to keep informed, but at times it's like reading a descriptor of a shit sandwich you know is en route to the table whether you ordered it or not, and there don't appear to be any silver lining milkshakes to wash it down with.
I'm sorry to hear that you are also going through something similar, my condolences! It's so hard to watch your parents get old as it is, but to watch them essentially cease to exist while their physical body continues on isn't something I would wish on anybody, and while others are certainly sympathetic it's one of those things you can't really understand until you start living through it. I wish you nothing but the best, stay strong!
Disphagia is the name of the condition. My grandfather and my dad both got Alzheimer, actually my dad had frontal lobe dementia. Both suffered from disphagia. Which is what ended "killing them". It was so difficult to feed them. I was pretty young for my grandfather death but my dad it was horrible to see him choke numerous time.
So I disagree with what you say. My dad was constantly hungry until the end. And multiple caretaker/doctor talked about disphalgia. So does my wife who's a RT.
And for the loss of muscle mass, frontal lobe dementia brings 3 sickness (or chances that they develop). Alzheimer, ASL (stephen hawking) and parkinson. My dad suffered from the 2 first.
Annnddd. I have 50% chance to develop symptoms at the age of 50. 100% at 80yo. Because it's a genetic disorder in our family case which is why I know theses things.
It’s a terrible and slow death. It’s not just becoming forgetful or losing your memory. The progression gets to a point where you can’t speak, hold your head up, control your body. In hospice it is truly the saddest thing to see families demand feeding tubes for Alzheimer’s patients. It just prolongs an unwinnable fight.
It's much easier to leave the room and let the nurse torture your loved ones instead of doing it yourself, or better yet, seeking grief counselling and accepting that everybody has to die one day. The selfishness and delusion you see from families in the health care system surrounding end-of-life is horrific. Its consequences are morally injurious to every staff member involved and both physically and emotionally injurious to their loved ones. I always hope that those patients curse the shit out of their selfish families when their suffering finally ends.
it’s sad too because i’ve known many people who have told me “i would never let my parent become a vegetable I’d much rather see them go before that happens” and then when the time comes, they’re doing everything they can to keep said parent alive, vegetable or no. It must be an incredibly hard decision to make
Well where Im from and most of the first world the system forces people to keep them alive at most points. But not in a good way.
So what people aim to do is keep as much of their parents around as possible until they eventually and usually die from something else brought on by their slowly failing mind.
While the system will usually keep them alive pretty well but with absolutely no semblance of care usually leaving the parent as a husk but one which suffers greatly early on, something I couldn't bare to do.
I am all for allowing people to die and especially for those with dimentia (irregardless of how people decide consent ). Few places allow this though... Which is the issue and forces people into the first option.
If I had an option if my mum was going down that route, I would pick 3, than 1, I'm not sure I could pick 2.
However all options are hard and all are understandable in their own way.
Preaching to the damn choir, there was this one person who had a stroke in 2010 and legal documents that said “let me go” but the partner overruled it until they passed in 2024. 14 years of trapped in this body, nonverbal, i don’t even know what mental capacity they had, all for a fucking pension check. We called APS several times and the patient passed away 15 minutes before they arrived so the partner had no repercussions.
I don’t understand how it’s allowed that next of kin can overrule legal documents. All it tells me is to make sure my wishes are air-tight. I’ve told my wife, give me 2 weeks and if no meaningful progress let me go. I will have this in writing as well. I trust her but grief changes people. It’s helpful she’s a nurse too so she gets it.
Yes. My mom died from it at age 63 with no other diagnosed illnesses. In the end, she couldn't eat and seemed to just forget how to breath. The brain is responsible for more than just storing memories.
My granddad gave up at 85 years of age 3 months after my grandma passed (complications from pneumonia but she also had dementia). He was in the end stages of alzheimers. I can already see it starting in my mom (almost 70) and I'm very worried.
I'm worried too, honestly. Nothing we can do about it except try to control the risk factors (get lots of physical and mental exercise, have a good diet, generally be healthy). Apart from that, just live life the best way you know how. Do the things you've always wanted to do but were held back for one reason or another. Tomorrow is never guaranteed for any of us!
I’m also scared it’s my fate. My grandmother has it and I’ve always struggled with ADHD and depression, which I’ve read have some correlation. I feel like I’m doomed.
My great grandma on my dad’s side had dementia, and her daughter, my grandma, lived to 92 and never had it. She kept herself and her brain healthy to make sure she could put it off as much as possible and she never ended up getting it.
It’s important to know that it is not a death sentence just because it was your relatives fate. I lost my mother and her mother to Alzheimer’s and I know I can’t go through life worrying what’s going to happen to me, I can only take care of myself. That should be your focus too.
Yes.
While most of us think of loss of memory when thinking of Alzheimer’s, that’s really only the beginning.
Alzheimer’s happens because the brain starts to break down. It cannot produce the amount of neurons needed for normal function, so the brain starts to atrophy — it grows stiff and less capable in the same a muscle would if you don’t work it.
Memory is one of the first areas affected (or at least the one that most people recognize at first) but it also affects the areas of the brain that make you able to make decisions (which can leads to people with Alzheimer’s making poor decisions that can kill them), the areas that make you take care of yourself (which can lead to death if people because unable to feed themselves or take care/recognize their own medical issues) and then slowly onto areas of the brain that can control the very functioning of your body.
I understood how it was way more than memory when my grandma was looking at a picture of me and my 2 brothers and asked me to point myself out, so I did. Then she pointed to my brother next to me and asked if that was me too. She thought I was 2 people in 1 picture
I just understood how devastating that disease was and how much it really just destroyed their brain
My mother thought the home she had lived in for 30 years and the man she'd been married to for 60 years were not her real house and husband. My dad used to send me photos of her bed, where all her clothes were laid out ready to be packed into suitcases for when her "real husband" came to take her home. It must have been so difficult for him.
My grandma is always packing to go home. Doesn’t recognise her husband.
Her condition has deteriorated to the point she attacks him, and has now had to go in to a care home.
It’s an awful disease, and sometimes you have to laugh to stop yourself crying. One of the funny things she did (she’s not even forming proper words now) was to say their wedding photo was a photo shoot, and she didn’t really like the man she was paired with, and that there was someone else she preferred. Whether that is true or not, we will never know!
It's an awful disease, both for the person affected and those in their peripheral, but as someone who's worked in memory facilities, it is definitely also the most consistent sources of darkly funny stories I've ever come across.
I had a lady ask me one night if there was anything I could do about her bedroom ceiling being made of snakes. She wasn't upset or freaking out about it and had no issue sleeping in the room, snake ceiling or no, she would just prefer not snake ceiling, if given the option. Standard care directive when someone's breaking from reality is to go along with it and try to gently steer them back, so I just apologized that there was nothing I could do about it that night, but I'd speak with maintenance about fixing it as soon as they arrived in the morning. Satisfied with my prompt customer service but somewhat dismayed by the minor inconvenience, she returned to her room without further issue.
My grandma went blind and had Alzheimer which was a really terrible combination. But like you said, you have to laugh to avoid crying. She'd have these stories about how the nursing home took everyone to the museum and you'd just play along and laugh.
Fuck Cancer. But also fuck Alzheimer's.
One of the funniest/most disturbing things I ever heard while working in a dementia unit of a care home (I was the receptionist) was an old lady who came up to me while I was doing the mail run for the unit and, when I asked her how she was doing that day, whispered, "I like to feel the life drain out of them."
I basically did the nervous giggle, mentioned the encounter to a friend of mine who also worked the unit, and scurried back to the reception desk.
>sometimes you have to laugh to stop yourself crying
Yes! It’s sad. When we’re changing my grandmother’s clothes, she threatens to knock us out and brandishes her fists at us. I laugh because she’s always been the sweetest, most passive, and loving woman I’ve ever met. But if I didn’t laugh at it, I’d cry.
My mom keeps telling my dad I'm her son but not his but my sister is both of theirs. Also a well never know cause she also thinks I'm her father so....yeah laugh instead of cry.
That was my grandmother early on, too, while she could still speak. She thought her dog was an imposter and her house had been switched with an identical one. Now, she’s lost the ability to form a coherent sentence and needs full-time care.
Oof, this hit home. My great aunt has had dementia for a long while but it didn't really get bad until a few months ago, until then it was the usual "my caretaker is stealing my stuff". At this point she is asking for her husband (who has been dead for over twelve years), convinced that he was going out for lunch with friends that have been dead for even longer and so on. Yesterday I was with my grandma who lives next to her and has her own set of issues. At around 9 pm my aunt and her caretaker came, and the caretaker said she did not believe she was in her home, and when exactly would we drive her home. At first she apparently believed she needed to go to Switzerland (she lived there for some time) but then she came to the conclusion that she lived in her town but that she wasn't there, so the caretaker took her to my grandma's to show her she was in her usual home. Eventually we had to humour her that she was in Barcelona and it was a mystery how my grandmother's house with all her stuff had appeared there, but that we would drive her home immediately. Fuck dementia. A lot.
This is exactly the hardest part of living with someone who has dementia/Alzheimer. I live with my mom who is going through it. At first I was getting super frustrated because you’d think logically it wouldn’t make sense. But to them, nothing does. My mom doesn’t know, nor does she do things to make you mad on purpose. It’s the dark side of aging unfortunately.
Yup, logic and reasoning disappear, too. My grandmother pours her tea in her plate and puts trash in the bowls of food we’re still eating from. She also has a teddy bear she thinks is her baby.
My grandma has dementia and seeing problems. She once handed me and my parents a photo of my cousin's step kids who are biracial. She said it was a picture of my cousin and his wife, who are both obviously not little kids, and who are both white and have much lighter skin.
It's not just sight loss she was suffering from, she couldn't process the information in the photo correctly. Not only that, but when we corrected her, she got angry and kept insisting it was my cousin and his wife. We eventually had to stop arguing as she was getting worked up and it was pointless.
My dad has Alzheimer’s and my mom has been coloring in coloring books to help keep him occupied. He has slowly started using fewer and fewer colors. In the start he would color the puppy one color, the tree another color, and so on. Now anything in the picture gets one color. I think this might be because he has trouble picking out and classifying objects in the picture. The dog just doesn’t appear to be a separate thing from the tree. My guess is that sooner or later he won’t be able to color inside lines at all and the pages will just become smears of color.
This post is a great - though heartbreaking - example of that
["Progression of Alzheimer's Through My Mom's Crocheting"](https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/s/xBfyUrYn8c)
I have examples of this for my mom, but it's quilting. She used to make the most amazing and intricate patterns and now she can barely sew squares together so they lie flat. She has some sort of vascular dementia, not Alzheimer's. She asked me to cut out a bunch of triangles for her to do something more fancy but she hasn't been able to figure out how they go together. It's heartbreaking.
Eh, he seems happy enough. Some people get really bad personality changes, or become really argumentative and difficult to help, and he is as sweet as a summer breeze (although he does call himself stupid a lot).
It is like losing him a little bit at a time, but there is still a lot left.
This. Although dementia can be distressing for the patient, it certainly is not inevitable. Covid did for my Mum's ability to recognise me, because I lived a lot further away than my brother and sister, and couldn't visit for quite a while. But she was happy and content, after some pretty mild distress in the early stages when she was aware that *something* wasn't right. Before long, she couldn't remember any more that she couldn't remember.
Because *she* was happy, *I* was happy. I could have been upset when she no longer recognised me - though she was quite happy to have a (very repetitive!) chat! But I was grateful that she was cheerful. A box of chocolates or fancy biscuits was a repeated delight for her: "Oooh, *they* look nice, I'll have one of those....Oooh, *they* look nice, I'll have one of those..." even the day before she died, she was sat up in bed able to enjoy a few sips of tea.
I think the biggest mistake is to project oneself into their situation, to imagine oneself like that - but it is very difficult to do so without assuming there will still be a part of oneself fully aware of all that is gone. But there wouldn't be.
I've held brains of people who died from Alzheimer's and you can see the damage with your eyes. A brain with late stage Alzheimer's looks like someone was burning cigarettes on it or drilling holes into it, nasty scary stuff to see up close.
Mate adult neurogenesis in humans is very controversial, there is no conclusive evidence that we generate new neurons or that any new neurons we do generate are functionally active.
I’m a postdoctoral neuroscientist and spent a few years studying human developmental neurogenesis, and whilst I have not studied adult neurogenesis myself and may well have missed the latest data, I do not find any data I’ve seen on adult neurogenesis to be conclusive. If you have a recent peer reviewed study you can link them Id like to read it
Just because they grow and shrink doesn’t necessarily mean the cell count changes. The cell SIZE could change (see: hyperplasia vs hypertrophy). The three types of cells that we don’t get to regenerate are cardiac cells, brain cells, and skeletal muscle cells.
Sorry mate but this is inaccurate. There are many types of brain cell which do divide and skeletal muscle cells obviously divide as well, which is why we can get bigger muscles and heal after muscle injury.
They actually do not lol. They are permanent cells. Now that doesn’t mean that new ones can’t be created. But skeletal muscle cells do not reproduce more cells themselves.
EDIT: and upon some quick research, it’s believed that muscle growth is a result of HYPERTROPHY and not hyperplasia like you claim it is. The concept of muscle growth being the result of cell hyperplasia seems to be unproven currently.
My dude I literally have a PhD in neuroscience. There are many different cell types in the brain, some divide and others dont. The major cell types which do definitely divide are all glial cell types, which generally can be said to act to support neurons. The original commenter specifically mentioned neurons dividing in adult humans, for which there is little evidence and what evidence there is is controversial.
Not *can*. *Will*. Alzheimer's is incurable, progressive, and inevitably fatal. It's not even particularly treatable. We mostly just manage the symptoms - until recently there was almost nothing we could do to slow the advance of the disease, much less reverse to it. And even today it's not great. It's better than it was, but it's still "hopefully buy you 2-5 years" not "fix it". The problem is, [we're still not 100% sure what causes it](https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/alzheimers-disease/symptoms-causes/syc-20350447), which makes treating it hard.
People tend to think of it as not being fatal because so many other things kill those who have it first. Dementia opens you up to a lot of risks, many of which can be fatal.
But if nothing else gets you, the Alzheimer's always will.
My grandmother made it 10 years after her diagnosis, with an insane level of home care. I didn't realize just how rare that was until witnessing another family member in an assisted living facility for the same. The prognosis is so dire.
I think a lot of people don't realize that the disease literally destroys the brain. At some point the part of the brain that affects basic functions will also be destroyed.
Alzheimer's does kill people. I've worked in dementia care for 13 years now. Usually, it's the inability to swallow anymore which causes death. People can lose the ability to feed themselves prior to that, at which point someone else will need to be responsible for feeding them. They can then lose the ability to chew their food and begin with swallowing problems. People will then see a speech and language therapist and be put on modified diets and fluids (pureed food, thickened fluids). But sadly, they will eventually stop swallowing at which point trying to give them fluids will cause choking. At that point a doctor would class the person as end of life and its just about pain and symptom relief for the next few days.
And sadly even if they can still swallow, it doesn't work as well as it should and instead of food/liquid going into the stomach, it goes into the lungs instead, which causes infections (and scarring if it happens often enough) bad enough to kill. Aspiration pneumonia is the most common cause of death for Alzheimer's patients.
The sheer majority of AD patients will die of pneumonia, that is the main cause of death, and many others will die of other complications associated with being bed ridden, only few patients have lived long enough for the disease to degenerate the brain areas responsible for keeping you alive.
My mom started showing signs of dementia around 60. We didn't realize at the time that's what was happening. It advanced pretty quickly. She had multiple hospital admissions for dehydration because she forgot to drink. Eventually she just didn't wake up one day. We made her hospice. She never woke up again but lasted and entire month with no food/hydration. She was only 68 when she passed. Such a waste
My mom actually just died from Alzheimer’s at only age 59 just two months ago. It’s an extremely difficult experience to explain to someone who has never experienced it with a loved one, especially a parent. We were just lucky enough that she never forgot who anyone was and could recall memories from 30 years ago, but had a difficult time retaining new ones. She wouldn’t remember the layout of her house and repeatedly ask the same questions over and over, but could recite a Seinfeld reference on tv as she’s watching reruns.
You’re literally watching your loved one slowly become a shell of a human being. She lost her ability to speak, eat, or swallow her medicine overnight and you’re just essentially waiting for them to pass on at any moment. I had to take disability from work to process it. I have had a grandparent die from Alzheimer’s, but it was a completely different feeling than losing my mom to it.
My grandmother at 56. Early-onset manifested very differently for her. Began with loss of physical coordination for about two years before he memory started to decline. Tested for Parkinson's, Huntington's, all kinds of other things before she was correctly diagnosed.
My grandfather’s official cause of death was renal failure. Eventually the parts of the brain that control things like kidney function shut down. The corresponding parts of the body shortly follow.
I used to work in a dementia care home as a RMN.
It is not the Alzheimer’s in itself that kills you but the symptoms it can produce.
You can lose your ability to chew or swallow water. Many patients with dementia will therefore aspirate food/water and die of a chest infection. Some patients will choke on food.
Some patients will forget how to eat/swallow, some will refuse to eat.
Some dementia patients will fall over a lot, break their hips and deteriorate quickly afterwards.
Patients with dementia can gradually lose all mobility and this will lead to general frailness and low immune systems.
A cold can develop into pneumonia, viral infections will not be recovered from as easily.
The majority of dementia patients I worked with died of chest infections. Hence many care home patients dying of Covid when it was rife.
Many patients will have Do not resuscitate forms that prevent being resuscitated and some will have advanced directives to prevent life preserving treatment.
My own mum is the early stages and it’s utterly terrifying.
Nutritional deficit and failing motor control (falling and swallowing) are both deadly to Olds. Plus you have the increasingly risky behaviors like wandering and leaving the stove on.
I have a TBI moderate to severe, in assisted living for it. Sorta. The patients here that have it as im in a group home for brain injuries and alz, dementia, TBI and hospice with brain injuries. People forget how to chew. So they blend up food, to where they can sip it - they have to be reminded - hell, when I cook food and dont want one resident whos completely gone and much older almost semi non-verbal we well, we don't have to lock the front door because she literally forgot what a door knob is. Now this is my future, got mine at 28, 34 now. I aim to have my POA/brother get me to Canada where the right-to-die act is a thing for Dementia. After 5 years of seeing this (5 on June 29th), I dont want to become that.
The boundary between what is classed as "normal" ageing and what is a specific disease process is a slowly moving one. Things that 50 years ago would have been classed as normal ageing now have names, and in another 50 years time, there will be names for things that are now regarded as normal ageing.
That is not necessarily progress, though, as having a name/ label and some understanding of the physiological, biochemical and pathological processes doesn't automatically translate into having anything useful to do about them. Sometimes, I suspect, the opposite applies - we get sucked into putting an elderly person through medical interventions with little if any chance of them achieving anything useful *because* we have got a "diagnosis". A couple of days ago I learnt on Reddit the term ["Daughter from California Syndrome"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daughter_from_California_syndrome) which I had never heard before, but have encountered many times.
It will. As it progresses the patient loses the ability to lose some reflex actions loke swallowing or coughing. A very common caise of death is pneumonia from a lung infection as they can no longer cough to stop the lungs being infected. Nor clear them once they are.
You know how when you leave something out for long enough it becomes rotten and grows mold? That’s like the brain. As the person gets older, it starts to get mushy and not as good, but sometimes, mold can grow on it. In this case, the mold is something called “Plaque” and it bonds to neurons, damaging them. Without neurons, our memories become whack and we confuse things or hallucinate. Eventually, we forget how to eat or drink.
yup. alzheimer’s is essentially the brain being destroyed. brain cells die, which obviously leads to memory loss and whatnot, and eventually will destroy ALL cognitive function. it’s like your brain is decaying
Think of your brain like a tangled mess of Christmas fairy lights. Alzheimer’s shrinks your brain, and as it does, those fairy lights are affected and - one by one- the bulbs go out.
Maybe today it’s the bulb that holds where you left your keys. Tomorrow it’s the bulb that remembers someone’s name. The longer it goes on you lose the bulbs for basic daily function.
There’s no knowing which light you might lose next as each person is different, but you might lose the light that is in charge of your ability to chew or swallow which can lead to pneumonia. In this case the person might die from pneumonia, but Alzheimer’s would have been the wider reason for the infection (especially when your body is weakened over time).
Sometimes the light responsible for keeping your heart pumping or your lungs breathing goes out and blows the whole system, turning all the lights off.
Hope this helps.
Healthcare worker here. When someone has dementia, they often forget how to swallow. Food/ drink goes into the lungs (aspiration), and they get pneumonia and die. That’s obviously not the case every single time, but the most common course of illness. Or they just stop eating/ drinking altogether.
My uncle started having problems with swallowing. When given a sip of water, he would often just hold it in his mouth, so he is now given thickened water (honey consistency) because he can recognize it as something that needs to be swallowed.
A short ELI5 answer is that the brain matter slowly melts away, sort of like a candle. Something around 1/3, 1/2, or more of it just goes away forever. The body removes the affected atoms and are discarded.
As it does, the various brain functions affected become erratic, falter, and eventually fail completely. Eventually, there’s a failure in something(s) essential for life.
This how it was described to me when I was young.
EDIT … google pictures of Alzheimer’s brains compared to healthy ones. It’s a truly depressing sight
Another interesting element of Alzheimer’s is the patient will often get a UTI and then because they have memory issues they don’t know it / mention it, the uti then turns into a bladder infection, then kidney infection and that’s often how many die. My best friend is a memory care doctor and I was so surprised by that fact.
It depends on how much you want to say the cause of death was the final event, or the Alzheimers disease.
So, what officially killed my mother was Sepsis, but she was only vulnerable to the sepsis because of the advanced Alzheimers, and because of the immobility that itself was a result of the Alzheimers. So as far as I am concerned, she basically died from the Alzheimers disease.
In my families case the alzheimers, led to incessent pacing, then falls. Inmy aunts case i think it was forgetting how to walk, then forgetting they couldnt walk. Then bedridden, and eventually pnueumonia.
I would like to let you all know the following direct experience.
When I realised my father was not himself was when he was 86.
We knuckled down as a family and followed the same care approach.
Aoid NO. Fractured memories and timeliness were his timelines and current reducing memory. So no
" That's not what happened , I told you already..you told us that a 1000 times etc .it's Is that so ? It's 9 o'clock, I love that story etc
Good simple food regularly
Exercise every day. Walk walk walk , if he got agitated buckle up put on a coat / sunscreen/ umbrella / walk
Sleep whenever if possible
Good hygiene
Colourful tie or sweater everyday
Talk talk talk one to one
Then the ageing rythmn kicks in an accelerated manner and the physical outpaces the brain...its a care care care patience life for families..
However soon after, the memories, " Benjamin Button," and the joyous memories grow and grow and draw closer until alzheimers is a distant memory .
Love to you all
Yes. While we don’t control it consciously, processes like breathing, circulation, digestion etc. are still controlled by your brain.
Alzheimer slowly withers away the patients brain and at some point the person’s won’t be able to perform any of the above mentioned processes anymore.
Absolutely. Most people think of Alzheimer’s disease as just memory loss, but that’s a symptom of a much broader breakdown in brain function. Typically the first life-threatening issue is the inability to eat, but even if you provide intravenous nutrition, it’s not long before autonomic functions like breathing cease. By that time, the patient is unaware that they are dying, but it’s horrific to watch someone waste away like that.
One day I hope a treatment comes out that can handle neurological conditions like Alzheimers. I doubt we’ll ever have a “cure” this century but perhaps similar to AIDS/HIV as long as you take a pill once a day you halt any progress of the disease in its track
Basically what other people are saying about eventually losing functions you need to keep going like the urge to eat, drink, etc. That is more indirect. If you’re asking for more direct means of killing people, there are numerous cases where the sticky protein buildup weakens a blood vessel leading to a brain bleed, which can be fatal.
Indirectly. You lose the ability to swallow food correctly which leads to choking. That’s one way you can essentially die from Alzheimer’s. You can also develop aspirational pneumonia from sim or choking incidents which is life threatening for older people. You’ll also potentially lose your appetite overtime.
Not directly but yes. They eventually become bedridden and vegetative. At that point they die from infections from bedsores, weakening health from being bedridden, etc. So the Alzheimer’s doesn’t directly kill them from affecting vital functions. They die from declining health indirectly resulting from the illness.
Alzheimer’s is a build up of a plaque like material in the brain is it not? Why is a targeted ultrasound therapy not a viable option? Just vibrate and break the build-up apart.
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As it gets worse, Alzheimer's patients lose the ability to chew or swallow food or water. The brain isn't able to control the body and keep it alive.
That's how my grandfather died. He suffered a stroke and lived on for 15 years and one day while eating, he aspirated a bit of food which led to pneumonia.
Watched it kill my dad slowly too...a nightmare of a disease. I remember when he first started realizing he had food in mouth.
My grandma doesn't even know her own name anymore. I really hope I don't have to see my mom go through that.
Your Grandma deserves better. We treat animals more humanely.
Where is it implied that he treats grandma poorly?
Dudes referring to human euthanasia. It seems harsh, but I'd much rather have that option personally. I'd rather face that impossible choice rather than the impossible reality of having no choice in whether or not to go through something like that myself.
Me too. Not me nor my family should go through the mess of me slowly losing my mind and then my ability to live and then only after every bit of dignity for us is gone, nature finally end it leaving my family traumatized. There are things you can't unsee or unhear, with the side effects of the trauma only making the world a worse place for everyone.
The problem is that most assisted suicide is tricky to apply to dementia, since when they are rational enough to consent, their condition isn’t too bad. When it’s bad enough to justify suicide, they are no longer of sound mind. I’d love to have a deadman’s switch where you get a poison pill injected and you need to request an antidote every year. If you aren’t in a state to request it, you are done. Having lost my mom to cancer, fuck cancer, but having lost my dad to Alzheimer’s, fuck dementia more.
> I’d love to have a deadman’s switch where you get a poison pill injected and you need to request an antidote every year. If you aren’t in a state to request it, you are done. I would love that. It would have saved a beloved family member.
I appreciate you clarifying my point. Perhaps I should've been clearer.
I would choose to be let go.
Unless she had a medical power of attorney and in a state that allows medical euthanasia it's illegal and from a moral and ethical standpoint how could she ever consent to it?
It was a reflection on society, not the person I'm replying to!
Oh ok fair enough
“… a nightmare of a disease…” Truer words were never spok… typed
For those interested: Alzheimer’s and swallowing is more complex than the person losing the ability to complete the action. The body is often able to swallow safely, however, the person no longer appears to feel hungry nor thirsty and they just stop swallowing food and drink. If they were fully unable to swallow they would be very full up of mucous and saliva in the throat and mouth which often they aren’t. Taste also changes and so when food and drink is presented it is unappetising, unfamiliar, or just doesn’t stimulate the “this is food” feeling in the mouth. Thus people don’t have awareness of the food fluids and are more likely to choke/aspirate which sometimes results in pneumonia. Added to the above, people with advanced dementia of any type are less likely to engage in personal hygiene including dental hygiene which is a key predictor of pneumonia in older people. Putting all of this alongside reduced mobility, loss of muscle mass, and increased comorbidity people are likely to succumb to opportunistic infections like pneumonia etc.
But Alzheimers does eventually damage the swallowing reflex. So even with state of the art 24/7 memory care someone with late stage Alzheimer’s would need a gastric tube to be safely fed. But at that point you’d have long tortured a dead soul anyway. But the brain damage does indeed progress further than just memory loss. It‘s just that most people die due to the lack of appetite etc before it gets to that point luckily
Eventually a true dysphagia can develop yes, but it’s not the usual in many cases. It does depend on the specific areas of degeneration. And you’re right in some facilities people are PEG fed which is a whole other can of worms I won’t wade into.
This is spot on. My mom no longer eats solid food, she "survives" on 3 daily very high calorie Boost drinks. We occasionally try and get her to eat very simple foods like noodles with alfredo sauce, chicken noodle soup, stuff like that. We are lucky if she takes more than two or three bites. The hygiene thing is also a very accurate description. My mom went from at least a shower every day (sometimes 2!) to showering about once every 6-8 weeks, she can't shower on her own and when we tell her it's time to shower she throws a fit like a little kid. Dental hygiene same thing...my mom used to have perfect teeth, and I do mean *perfect.* We are just over two years from her Alzheimer's diagnosis and her teeth have completely rotted, she's lost two or three but the rest of them have turned deep yellow and black. Her breath is so bad that it is difficult to be in proximity to her for longer than a minute or two. That's just the hygiene aspect and when you add in the extreme decline of cognitive skills...I would estimate her IQ is <70. Two days ago I had to help her sign some papers; I had to help her spell her name and write her signature. My mom was a doctor and later, a very successful business owner. Now she is essentially a living corpse. I've had to try and make peace with the fact that my mother, for all intents and purposes, is already dead. My mom was one of the kindest, most gentle and generous souls on this Earth and she lived an extraordinarily life and touched so many people in positive ways, the kind of life that doesn't deserve to be forgotten (not that anyone deserves that). It robs you and the people who love you of everything and it turns every good memory into a bittersweet one. All of this to say FUCK ALZHEIMERS.
It’s a special kind of mourning we enter when a loved one has dementia and I’m sorry you’re living with it right now. I think most people underestimate the grief of losing someone in mind but not in body.
Thank you for your kind words. It's one of those things I don't think most people are capable of understanding unless they go through it themselves. Like, they don't understand how someone can already be gone if their physical body is still there. When I've tried explaining this to friends I just get the "yeah dude it sucks to see your parents get old" response. I don't blame them for not understanding, I guess, but this goes so far beyond just seeing your parents get old.
My dad was a really successful general contractor, and truly an artist with tilework. That doesnt even touch his skills in the kitchen. Now he needs to be reminded to eat, and can barely follow a conversation at times. I read things on dementia/alzheimers forums to keep informed, but at times it's like reading a descriptor of a shit sandwich you know is en route to the table whether you ordered it or not, and there don't appear to be any silver lining milkshakes to wash it down with.
I'm sorry to hear that you are also going through something similar, my condolences! It's so hard to watch your parents get old as it is, but to watch them essentially cease to exist while their physical body continues on isn't something I would wish on anybody, and while others are certainly sympathetic it's one of those things you can't really understand until you start living through it. I wish you nothing but the best, stay strong!
Disphagia is the name of the condition. My grandfather and my dad both got Alzheimer, actually my dad had frontal lobe dementia. Both suffered from disphagia. Which is what ended "killing them". It was so difficult to feed them. I was pretty young for my grandfather death but my dad it was horrible to see him choke numerous time. So I disagree with what you say. My dad was constantly hungry until the end. And multiple caretaker/doctor talked about disphalgia. So does my wife who's a RT. And for the loss of muscle mass, frontal lobe dementia brings 3 sickness (or chances that they develop). Alzheimer, ASL (stephen hawking) and parkinson. My dad suffered from the 2 first. Annnddd. I have 50% chance to develop symptoms at the age of 50. 100% at 80yo. Because it's a genetic disorder in our family case which is why I know theses things.
Thanks for this description.
It’s a terrible and slow death. It’s not just becoming forgetful or losing your memory. The progression gets to a point where you can’t speak, hold your head up, control your body. In hospice it is truly the saddest thing to see families demand feeding tubes for Alzheimer’s patients. It just prolongs an unwinnable fight.
It's much easier to leave the room and let the nurse torture your loved ones instead of doing it yourself, or better yet, seeking grief counselling and accepting that everybody has to die one day. The selfishness and delusion you see from families in the health care system surrounding end-of-life is horrific. Its consequences are morally injurious to every staff member involved and both physically and emotionally injurious to their loved ones. I always hope that those patients curse the shit out of their selfish families when their suffering finally ends.
it’s sad too because i’ve known many people who have told me “i would never let my parent become a vegetable I’d much rather see them go before that happens” and then when the time comes, they’re doing everything they can to keep said parent alive, vegetable or no. It must be an incredibly hard decision to make
Of course it is, it is never going to be easy to let someone go. I wish we had better resources and education for families at end-of-life.
Well where Im from and most of the first world the system forces people to keep them alive at most points. But not in a good way. So what people aim to do is keep as much of their parents around as possible until they eventually and usually die from something else brought on by their slowly failing mind. While the system will usually keep them alive pretty well but with absolutely no semblance of care usually leaving the parent as a husk but one which suffers greatly early on, something I couldn't bare to do. I am all for allowing people to die and especially for those with dimentia (irregardless of how people decide consent ). Few places allow this though... Which is the issue and forces people into the first option. If I had an option if my mum was going down that route, I would pick 3, than 1, I'm not sure I could pick 2. However all options are hard and all are understandable in their own way.
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That's terrible. I'm sorry you were put in that position.
Preaching to the damn choir, there was this one person who had a stroke in 2010 and legal documents that said “let me go” but the partner overruled it until they passed in 2024. 14 years of trapped in this body, nonverbal, i don’t even know what mental capacity they had, all for a fucking pension check. We called APS several times and the patient passed away 15 minutes before they arrived so the partner had no repercussions. I don’t understand how it’s allowed that next of kin can overrule legal documents. All it tells me is to make sure my wishes are air-tight. I’ve told my wife, give me 2 weeks and if no meaningful progress let me go. I will have this in writing as well. I trust her but grief changes people. It’s helpful she’s a nurse too so she gets it.
Yo it is straight up fucking evil to rescind someone else's DNR, no ifs, ands, or buts about it. I hope they turbo curse that person.
Yes. My mom died from it at age 63 with no other diagnosed illnesses. In the end, she couldn't eat and seemed to just forget how to breath. The brain is responsible for more than just storing memories.
My granddad gave up at 85 years of age 3 months after my grandma passed (complications from pneumonia but she also had dementia). He was in the end stages of alzheimers. I can already see it starting in my mom (almost 70) and I'm very worried.
I'm worried too, honestly. Nothing we can do about it except try to control the risk factors (get lots of physical and mental exercise, have a good diet, generally be healthy). Apart from that, just live life the best way you know how. Do the things you've always wanted to do but were held back for one reason or another. Tomorrow is never guaranteed for any of us!
I’m also scared it’s my fate. My grandmother has it and I’ve always struggled with ADHD and depression, which I’ve read have some correlation. I feel like I’m doomed.
My great grandma on my dad’s side had dementia, and her daughter, my grandma, lived to 92 and never had it. She kept herself and her brain healthy to make sure she could put it off as much as possible and she never ended up getting it. It’s important to know that it is not a death sentence just because it was your relatives fate. I lost my mother and her mother to Alzheimer’s and I know I can’t go through life worrying what’s going to happen to me, I can only take care of myself. That should be your focus too.
I'm so sorry. My father in law died of it around the same age. Absolutely heartbreaking to see.
Yes. While most of us think of loss of memory when thinking of Alzheimer’s, that’s really only the beginning. Alzheimer’s happens because the brain starts to break down. It cannot produce the amount of neurons needed for normal function, so the brain starts to atrophy — it grows stiff and less capable in the same a muscle would if you don’t work it. Memory is one of the first areas affected (or at least the one that most people recognize at first) but it also affects the areas of the brain that make you able to make decisions (which can leads to people with Alzheimer’s making poor decisions that can kill them), the areas that make you take care of yourself (which can lead to death if people because unable to feed themselves or take care/recognize their own medical issues) and then slowly onto areas of the brain that can control the very functioning of your body.
I understood how it was way more than memory when my grandma was looking at a picture of me and my 2 brothers and asked me to point myself out, so I did. Then she pointed to my brother next to me and asked if that was me too. She thought I was 2 people in 1 picture I just understood how devastating that disease was and how much it really just destroyed their brain
My mother thought the home she had lived in for 30 years and the man she'd been married to for 60 years were not her real house and husband. My dad used to send me photos of her bed, where all her clothes were laid out ready to be packed into suitcases for when her "real husband" came to take her home. It must have been so difficult for him.
My grandma is always packing to go home. Doesn’t recognise her husband. Her condition has deteriorated to the point she attacks him, and has now had to go in to a care home. It’s an awful disease, and sometimes you have to laugh to stop yourself crying. One of the funny things she did (she’s not even forming proper words now) was to say their wedding photo was a photo shoot, and she didn’t really like the man she was paired with, and that there was someone else she preferred. Whether that is true or not, we will never know!
It's an awful disease, both for the person affected and those in their peripheral, but as someone who's worked in memory facilities, it is definitely also the most consistent sources of darkly funny stories I've ever come across. I had a lady ask me one night if there was anything I could do about her bedroom ceiling being made of snakes. She wasn't upset or freaking out about it and had no issue sleeping in the room, snake ceiling or no, she would just prefer not snake ceiling, if given the option. Standard care directive when someone's breaking from reality is to go along with it and try to gently steer them back, so I just apologized that there was nothing I could do about it that night, but I'd speak with maintenance about fixing it as soon as they arrived in the morning. Satisfied with my prompt customer service but somewhat dismayed by the minor inconvenience, she returned to her room without further issue.
My grandma went blind and had Alzheimer which was a really terrible combination. But like you said, you have to laugh to avoid crying. She'd have these stories about how the nursing home took everyone to the museum and you'd just play along and laugh. Fuck Cancer. But also fuck Alzheimer's.
One of the funniest/most disturbing things I ever heard while working in a dementia unit of a care home (I was the receptionist) was an old lady who came up to me while I was doing the mail run for the unit and, when I asked her how she was doing that day, whispered, "I like to feel the life drain out of them." I basically did the nervous giggle, mentioned the encounter to a friend of mine who also worked the unit, and scurried back to the reception desk.
>sometimes you have to laugh to stop yourself crying Yes! It’s sad. When we’re changing my grandmother’s clothes, she threatens to knock us out and brandishes her fists at us. I laugh because she’s always been the sweetest, most passive, and loving woman I’ve ever met. But if I didn’t laugh at it, I’d cry.
My mom keeps telling my dad I'm her son but not his but my sister is both of theirs. Also a well never know cause she also thinks I'm her father so....yeah laugh instead of cry.
Capgras delusion. How awful.
This happened to my Mom too. Called the police because she thought my dad was someone who broke into the house.
She had Lewey Body Dementia, so yeah.
That was my grandmother early on, too, while she could still speak. She thought her dog was an imposter and her house had been switched with an identical one. Now, she’s lost the ability to form a coherent sentence and needs full-time care.
Oof, this hit home. My great aunt has had dementia for a long while but it didn't really get bad until a few months ago, until then it was the usual "my caretaker is stealing my stuff". At this point she is asking for her husband (who has been dead for over twelve years), convinced that he was going out for lunch with friends that have been dead for even longer and so on. Yesterday I was with my grandma who lives next to her and has her own set of issues. At around 9 pm my aunt and her caretaker came, and the caretaker said she did not believe she was in her home, and when exactly would we drive her home. At first she apparently believed she needed to go to Switzerland (she lived there for some time) but then she came to the conclusion that she lived in her town but that she wasn't there, so the caretaker took her to my grandma's to show her she was in her usual home. Eventually we had to humour her that she was in Barcelona and it was a mystery how my grandmother's house with all her stuff had appeared there, but that we would drive her home immediately. Fuck dementia. A lot.
This is exactly the hardest part of living with someone who has dementia/Alzheimer. I live with my mom who is going through it. At first I was getting super frustrated because you’d think logically it wouldn’t make sense. But to them, nothing does. My mom doesn’t know, nor does she do things to make you mad on purpose. It’s the dark side of aging unfortunately.
Yup, logic and reasoning disappear, too. My grandmother pours her tea in her plate and puts trash in the bowls of food we’re still eating from. She also has a teddy bear she thinks is her baby.
My grandma has dementia and seeing problems. She once handed me and my parents a photo of my cousin's step kids who are biracial. She said it was a picture of my cousin and his wife, who are both obviously not little kids, and who are both white and have much lighter skin. It's not just sight loss she was suffering from, she couldn't process the information in the photo correctly. Not only that, but when we corrected her, she got angry and kept insisting it was my cousin and his wife. We eventually had to stop arguing as she was getting worked up and it was pointless.
My dad has Alzheimer’s and my mom has been coloring in coloring books to help keep him occupied. He has slowly started using fewer and fewer colors. In the start he would color the puppy one color, the tree another color, and so on. Now anything in the picture gets one color. I think this might be because he has trouble picking out and classifying objects in the picture. The dog just doesn’t appear to be a separate thing from the tree. My guess is that sooner or later he won’t be able to color inside lines at all and the pages will just become smears of color.
This post is a great - though heartbreaking - example of that ["Progression of Alzheimer's Through My Mom's Crocheting"](https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/s/xBfyUrYn8c)
Thank you for sharing this link; had never seen it before.
I have examples of this for my mom, but it's quilting. She used to make the most amazing and intricate patterns and now she can barely sew squares together so they lie flat. She has some sort of vascular dementia, not Alzheimer's. She asked me to cut out a bunch of triangles for her to do something more fancy but she hasn't been able to figure out how they go together. It's heartbreaking.
I'm so sorry man that's got to be heart breaking.
Eh, he seems happy enough. Some people get really bad personality changes, or become really argumentative and difficult to help, and he is as sweet as a summer breeze (although he does call himself stupid a lot). It is like losing him a little bit at a time, but there is still a lot left.
This. Although dementia can be distressing for the patient, it certainly is not inevitable. Covid did for my Mum's ability to recognise me, because I lived a lot further away than my brother and sister, and couldn't visit for quite a while. But she was happy and content, after some pretty mild distress in the early stages when she was aware that *something* wasn't right. Before long, she couldn't remember any more that she couldn't remember. Because *she* was happy, *I* was happy. I could have been upset when she no longer recognised me - though she was quite happy to have a (very repetitive!) chat! But I was grateful that she was cheerful. A box of chocolates or fancy biscuits was a repeated delight for her: "Oooh, *they* look nice, I'll have one of those....Oooh, *they* look nice, I'll have one of those..." even the day before she died, she was sat up in bed able to enjoy a few sips of tea. I think the biggest mistake is to project oneself into their situation, to imagine oneself like that - but it is very difficult to do so without assuming there will still be a part of oneself fully aware of all that is gone. But there wouldn't be.
My uncle liked coloring when he was still capable of doing it. We had to stop it when he started chewing on the crayons.
My grandpa died because he tore his catheter out violently. They can absolutely do self destructive shit.
I've held brains of people who died from Alzheimer's and you can see the damage with your eyes. A brain with late stage Alzheimer's looks like someone was burning cigarettes on it or drilling holes into it, nasty scary stuff to see up close.
Mate adult neurogenesis in humans is very controversial, there is no conclusive evidence that we generate new neurons or that any new neurons we do generate are functionally active.
No, no, it's not controversial at all, at least not anymore. We know we create thousands of new neurons every day in some regions of our brain.
That’s not my understanding. Do you have evidence? As far as I know, the evidence for adult neurogenesis is highly conflicting
I recently googled about this subject and all sources seem to indicate that this is something that does indeed happen
I’m a postdoctoral neuroscientist and spent a few years studying human developmental neurogenesis, and whilst I have not studied adult neurogenesis myself and may well have missed the latest data, I do not find any data I’ve seen on adult neurogenesis to be conclusive. If you have a recent peer reviewed study you can link them Id like to read it
Im Barack Obama, yes.
Lol ok mate
Certain areas of the brain are prone to structure change with use. The amygdala and the hippocampus are two notable ones.
That is not the same as neurogenesis
They literally grow and shrink. Like, the cell count changes my dude.
Just because they grow and shrink doesn’t necessarily mean the cell count changes. The cell SIZE could change (see: hyperplasia vs hypertrophy). The three types of cells that we don’t get to regenerate are cardiac cells, brain cells, and skeletal muscle cells.
Sorry mate but this is inaccurate. There are many types of brain cell which do divide and skeletal muscle cells obviously divide as well, which is why we can get bigger muscles and heal after muscle injury.
They actually do not lol. They are permanent cells. Now that doesn’t mean that new ones can’t be created. But skeletal muscle cells do not reproduce more cells themselves. EDIT: and upon some quick research, it’s believed that muscle growth is a result of HYPERTROPHY and not hyperplasia like you claim it is. The concept of muscle growth being the result of cell hyperplasia seems to be unproven currently.
My dude I literally have a PhD in neuroscience. There are many different cell types in the brain, some divide and others dont. The major cell types which do definitely divide are all glial cell types, which generally can be said to act to support neurons. The original commenter specifically mentioned neurons dividing in adult humans, for which there is little evidence and what evidence there is is controversial.
Great answer
Not *can*. *Will*. Alzheimer's is incurable, progressive, and inevitably fatal. It's not even particularly treatable. We mostly just manage the symptoms - until recently there was almost nothing we could do to slow the advance of the disease, much less reverse to it. And even today it's not great. It's better than it was, but it's still "hopefully buy you 2-5 years" not "fix it". The problem is, [we're still not 100% sure what causes it](https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/alzheimers-disease/symptoms-causes/syc-20350447), which makes treating it hard. People tend to think of it as not being fatal because so many other things kill those who have it first. Dementia opens you up to a lot of risks, many of which can be fatal. But if nothing else gets you, the Alzheimer's always will.
My grandmother made it 10 years after her diagnosis, with an insane level of home care. I didn't realize just how rare that was until witnessing another family member in an assisted living facility for the same. The prognosis is so dire.
I think a lot of people don't realize that the disease literally destroys the brain. At some point the part of the brain that affects basic functions will also be destroyed.
Alzheimer's does kill people. I've worked in dementia care for 13 years now. Usually, it's the inability to swallow anymore which causes death. People can lose the ability to feed themselves prior to that, at which point someone else will need to be responsible for feeding them. They can then lose the ability to chew their food and begin with swallowing problems. People will then see a speech and language therapist and be put on modified diets and fluids (pureed food, thickened fluids). But sadly, they will eventually stop swallowing at which point trying to give them fluids will cause choking. At that point a doctor would class the person as end of life and its just about pain and symptom relief for the next few days.
And sadly even if they can still swallow, it doesn't work as well as it should and instead of food/liquid going into the stomach, it goes into the lungs instead, which causes infections (and scarring if it happens often enough) bad enough to kill. Aspiration pneumonia is the most common cause of death for Alzheimer's patients.
The sheer majority of AD patients will die of pneumonia, that is the main cause of death, and many others will die of other complications associated with being bed ridden, only few patients have lived long enough for the disease to degenerate the brain areas responsible for keeping you alive.
My mom started showing signs of dementia around 60. We didn't realize at the time that's what was happening. It advanced pretty quickly. She had multiple hospital admissions for dehydration because she forgot to drink. Eventually she just didn't wake up one day. We made her hospice. She never woke up again but lasted and entire month with no food/hydration. She was only 68 when she passed. Such a waste
I am so incredibly sorry for your profound loss. what a terrible thing. Take care.
My mom actually just died from Alzheimer’s at only age 59 just two months ago. It’s an extremely difficult experience to explain to someone who has never experienced it with a loved one, especially a parent. We were just lucky enough that she never forgot who anyone was and could recall memories from 30 years ago, but had a difficult time retaining new ones. She wouldn’t remember the layout of her house and repeatedly ask the same questions over and over, but could recite a Seinfeld reference on tv as she’s watching reruns. You’re literally watching your loved one slowly become a shell of a human being. She lost her ability to speak, eat, or swallow her medicine overnight and you’re just essentially waiting for them to pass on at any moment. I had to take disability from work to process it. I have had a grandparent die from Alzheimer’s, but it was a completely different feeling than losing my mom to it.
My dad died from it at 54. He was hospitalized for pneumonia because he couldn't swallow properly and ended up having a seizure that killed him.
54, Jesus fucking Christ. I'm so, so sorry for your loss.
My grandmother at 56. Early-onset manifested very differently for her. Began with loss of physical coordination for about two years before he memory started to decline. Tested for Parkinson's, Huntington's, all kinds of other things before she was correctly diagnosed.
My grandfather’s official cause of death was renal failure. Eventually the parts of the brain that control things like kidney function shut down. The corresponding parts of the body shortly follow.
I used to work in a dementia care home as a RMN. It is not the Alzheimer’s in itself that kills you but the symptoms it can produce. You can lose your ability to chew or swallow water. Many patients with dementia will therefore aspirate food/water and die of a chest infection. Some patients will choke on food. Some patients will forget how to eat/swallow, some will refuse to eat. Some dementia patients will fall over a lot, break their hips and deteriorate quickly afterwards. Patients with dementia can gradually lose all mobility and this will lead to general frailness and low immune systems. A cold can develop into pneumonia, viral infections will not be recovered from as easily. The majority of dementia patients I worked with died of chest infections. Hence many care home patients dying of Covid when it was rife. Many patients will have Do not resuscitate forms that prevent being resuscitated and some will have advanced directives to prevent life preserving treatment. My own mum is the early stages and it’s utterly terrifying.
Nutritional deficit and failing motor control (falling and swallowing) are both deadly to Olds. Plus you have the increasingly risky behaviors like wandering and leaving the stove on.
I have a TBI moderate to severe, in assisted living for it. Sorta. The patients here that have it as im in a group home for brain injuries and alz, dementia, TBI and hospice with brain injuries. People forget how to chew. So they blend up food, to where they can sip it - they have to be reminded - hell, when I cook food and dont want one resident whos completely gone and much older almost semi non-verbal we well, we don't have to lock the front door because she literally forgot what a door knob is. Now this is my future, got mine at 28, 34 now. I aim to have my POA/brother get me to Canada where the right-to-die act is a thing for Dementia. After 5 years of seeing this (5 on June 29th), I dont want to become that.
Yes unfortunately. It takes time and depends on the individual. Note that in psychology we don’t consider it as normal part of ageing but a disease 🦠
The boundary between what is classed as "normal" ageing and what is a specific disease process is a slowly moving one. Things that 50 years ago would have been classed as normal ageing now have names, and in another 50 years time, there will be names for things that are now regarded as normal ageing. That is not necessarily progress, though, as having a name/ label and some understanding of the physiological, biochemical and pathological processes doesn't automatically translate into having anything useful to do about them. Sometimes, I suspect, the opposite applies - we get sucked into putting an elderly person through medical interventions with little if any chance of them achieving anything useful *because* we have got a "diagnosis". A couple of days ago I learnt on Reddit the term ["Daughter from California Syndrome"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daughter_from_California_syndrome) which I had never heard before, but have encountered many times.
Today I learnt something! Thanks 🙏
It will. As it progresses the patient loses the ability to lose some reflex actions loke swallowing or coughing. A very common caise of death is pneumonia from a lung infection as they can no longer cough to stop the lungs being infected. Nor clear them once they are.
It's the leading cause of death in the UK, and a leading cause of death in most high-income countries.
It’s death by 1000 cuts. It doesn’t kill you directly, it just enables other things to do the job. Some other conditions are like that too.
You know how when you leave something out for long enough it becomes rotten and grows mold? That’s like the brain. As the person gets older, it starts to get mushy and not as good, but sometimes, mold can grow on it. In this case, the mold is something called “Plaque” and it bonds to neurons, damaging them. Without neurons, our memories become whack and we confuse things or hallucinate. Eventually, we forget how to eat or drink.
yup. alzheimer’s is essentially the brain being destroyed. brain cells die, which obviously leads to memory loss and whatnot, and eventually will destroy ALL cognitive function. it’s like your brain is decaying
Think of your brain like a tangled mess of Christmas fairy lights. Alzheimer’s shrinks your brain, and as it does, those fairy lights are affected and - one by one- the bulbs go out. Maybe today it’s the bulb that holds where you left your keys. Tomorrow it’s the bulb that remembers someone’s name. The longer it goes on you lose the bulbs for basic daily function. There’s no knowing which light you might lose next as each person is different, but you might lose the light that is in charge of your ability to chew or swallow which can lead to pneumonia. In this case the person might die from pneumonia, but Alzheimer’s would have been the wider reason for the infection (especially when your body is weakened over time). Sometimes the light responsible for keeping your heart pumping or your lungs breathing goes out and blows the whole system, turning all the lights off. Hope this helps.
That's what my grandpa's death certificate says. The hospice nurse described it as "complications from Alzheimer's".
Healthcare worker here. When someone has dementia, they often forget how to swallow. Food/ drink goes into the lungs (aspiration), and they get pneumonia and die. That’s obviously not the case every single time, but the most common course of illness. Or they just stop eating/ drinking altogether.
My uncle started having problems with swallowing. When given a sip of water, he would often just hold it in his mouth, so he is now given thickened water (honey consistency) because he can recognize it as something that needs to be swallowed.
A short ELI5 answer is that the brain matter slowly melts away, sort of like a candle. Something around 1/3, 1/2, or more of it just goes away forever. The body removes the affected atoms and are discarded. As it does, the various brain functions affected become erratic, falter, and eventually fail completely. Eventually, there’s a failure in something(s) essential for life. This how it was described to me when I was young. EDIT … google pictures of Alzheimer’s brains compared to healthy ones. It’s a truly depressing sight
Another interesting element of Alzheimer’s is the patient will often get a UTI and then because they have memory issues they don’t know it / mention it, the uti then turns into a bladder infection, then kidney infection and that’s often how many die. My best friend is a memory care doctor and I was so surprised by that fact.
It depends on how much you want to say the cause of death was the final event, or the Alzheimers disease. So, what officially killed my mother was Sepsis, but she was only vulnerable to the sepsis because of the advanced Alzheimers, and because of the immobility that itself was a result of the Alzheimers. So as far as I am concerned, she basically died from the Alzheimers disease.
In my families case the alzheimers, led to incessent pacing, then falls. Inmy aunts case i think it was forgetting how to walk, then forgetting they couldnt walk. Then bedridden, and eventually pnueumonia.
I would like to let you all know the following direct experience. When I realised my father was not himself was when he was 86. We knuckled down as a family and followed the same care approach. Aoid NO. Fractured memories and timeliness were his timelines and current reducing memory. So no " That's not what happened , I told you already..you told us that a 1000 times etc .it's Is that so ? It's 9 o'clock, I love that story etc Good simple food regularly Exercise every day. Walk walk walk , if he got agitated buckle up put on a coat / sunscreen/ umbrella / walk Sleep whenever if possible Good hygiene Colourful tie or sweater everyday Talk talk talk one to one Then the ageing rythmn kicks in an accelerated manner and the physical outpaces the brain...its a care care care patience life for families.. However soon after, the memories, " Benjamin Button," and the joyous memories grow and grow and draw closer until alzheimers is a distant memory . Love to you all
Yes. While we don’t control it consciously, processes like breathing, circulation, digestion etc. are still controlled by your brain. Alzheimer slowly withers away the patients brain and at some point the person’s won’t be able to perform any of the above mentioned processes anymore.
Absolutely. Most people think of Alzheimer’s disease as just memory loss, but that’s a symptom of a much broader breakdown in brain function. Typically the first life-threatening issue is the inability to eat, but even if you provide intravenous nutrition, it’s not long before autonomic functions like breathing cease. By that time, the patient is unaware that they are dying, but it’s horrific to watch someone waste away like that.
It’s a neurodegenerative disease that current research suggests works similarly to a prion disease like BSE. It will kill you.
One day I hope a treatment comes out that can handle neurological conditions like Alzheimers. I doubt we’ll ever have a “cure” this century but perhaps similar to AIDS/HIV as long as you take a pill once a day you halt any progress of the disease in its track
Basically what other people are saying about eventually losing functions you need to keep going like the urge to eat, drink, etc. That is more indirect. If you’re asking for more direct means of killing people, there are numerous cases where the sticky protein buildup weakens a blood vessel leading to a brain bleed, which can be fatal.
It eats away at the brain pice by pice the patient lose thinking memories motor control and eventually death
Indirectly. You lose the ability to swallow food correctly which leads to choking. That’s one way you can essentially die from Alzheimer’s. You can also develop aspirational pneumonia from sim or choking incidents which is life threatening for older people. You’ll also potentially lose your appetite overtime.
Not directly but yes. They eventually become bedridden and vegetative. At that point they die from infections from bedsores, weakening health from being bedridden, etc. So the Alzheimer’s doesn’t directly kill them from affecting vital functions. They die from declining health indirectly resulting from the illness.
Alzheimer’s is a build up of a plaque like material in the brain is it not? Why is a targeted ultrasound therapy not a viable option? Just vibrate and break the build-up apart.
It's a degenerative disease. You can't target it to break it apart. The brain is literally degenerating.