If you want to congratulate Dr. Peter Whitehouse and Danny George for writing their book The Myth of Alzheimer’s, let them know how wrong you think they are, or are just plain curious, here’s your chance. They’ll be featured on a HealthTalk webcast tomorrow night (Wednesday, May 14th) at 7 PM eastern. Details are on the registration page at the HealthTalk site.
Summary: Dr. Marwan Sabbagh’s new book The Alzheimer's Answer: Reduce Your Risk and Keep Your Brain Healthy
Dr. Marwan Sabbagh is a geriatric neurologist and Alzheimer’s researcher at Sun Health Research Institute in Arizona. He spends his days seeing memory loss patients and their families, and supervising Alzheimer’s clinical trials. He helped care for his mother-in-law when she suffered from dementia. Like all of us who have watched family members struggle with memory loss, he worries about how it will affect his generation and his children’s.
Marwan Sabbagh, MD
For a man who admits to a fear of aging, he has deep personal relationships with the elders in his community. He calls Alzheimer’s “the embodiment of all that is sad and destructive about growing old,” and spends a lot of time thinking about what contributes to successful aging.
Looking at both the personal and the societal costs of Alzheimer’s, Dr. Sabbagh has come to the conclusion that our approach to memory loss must emphasize prevention. This is message of his new book The Alzheimer's Answer: Reduce Your Risk and Keep Your Brain Healthy
We seem to be rethinking everything right now - the energy we use, the pollution we create, the foods we eat. Peter Whitehouse, a prominent Alzheimer’s researcher and doctor, is also rethinking the disease we call late onset Alzheimer’s.
In his new book, The Myth of Alzheimer's: What You Aren't Being Told About Today's Most Dreaded Diagnosis
Two years after my father’s death, people ask why I’m still researching and writing about Alzheimer’s and dementia. I tell them I want to help other families who are going through what mine did. I also tell them that Alzheimer’s researchers are teaching me a lot about science. What’s harder to explain is that people with dementia are teaching me a lot about life.
David Shenk, author of The Forgetting: Alzheimer's: Portrait of an Epidemic
David Shenk, author of The Forgetting, with Judy Wurtz, Director of Volunteers and Member of the Board, California Southland Chapter of the Alzheimer's Association at the Early Memory Loss Forum
Continue reading "David Shenk's Talk on Alzheimer's at the Early Memory Loss Forum" »
David Loewenstein, Ph.D., is Professor and Director of Neuropsychology at the University of Miami School of Medicine and Research Director at the Wien Center for Alzheimer’s Disease and Memory Disorders at Mt. Sinai Medical Center. In a previous post, I wrote about his research on cognitive rehabilitation for people with Alzheimer’s.
As part of his job, he writes articles about Alzheimer’s for scientific and medical journals. But he’s also written a book about his special needs daughter, Rachel, who was born four months early. For the Love of Rachel: A Father's Story
Continue reading "An Alzheimer's Researcher Writes About His Daughter" »
Summary: The Serper Method™ is a cognitive stimulation program that emphasizes personal and cultural information, along with social and conversational skills. Although more testing is needed, anecdotal reports and results of a small pilot program are encouraging.
Dr. Lynn Serper, a teacher for children with learning disabilities, was in her late 40s when she suffered a ruptured brain aneurysm, then a stroke and fell into a coma. When she awoke, she couldn’t talk, read, write or think clearly.
Ignoring her doctors’ pessimism about her condition, she decided to put together a recovery program for herself based on exercises she had developed for the classroom. “If children with learning disabilities could learn from my methods, why couldn’t I?” she says.
She attributes her eventual recovery to her program, which combined reading exercises with information about history, geography and current events. After working through the program for six years, she was able to complete a dissertation, and earned a doctorate in Cognitive Education.
During her recovery, she refined the exercises to develop The Serper Method, a cognitive stimulation program for people with dementia, aphasia [loss of ability to speak or understand speech] and traumatic brain injury. In her book, Brainstorming : The Serper Method of Brain Recovery, Regrowth, and Vitality
A Different Approach to Cognitive Stimulation
Because of Dr. Serper’s background, The Serper Method emphasizes personal and cultural information, as well as social and conversational skills.
From her experience as a teacher, Dr. Serper knew that children seemed to learn more when the learning process was related to their culture and their interests. And in her opinion, as her students learned more, their self-esteem and socialization skills increased.
She applied the same concepts when developing her workbooks. “The stories in the workbooks are true and inspirational,” she says. “The history is drawn from the American experience, often within the lifetime of the learner, and geography is based upon location, facts and tales from the different regions of the United States. In this re-learning, individuals have an opportunity to gather information for conversations based on memories and experiences.”
Comparing her method to other cognitive stimulation programs, Dr. Serper says she thinks “both methods effectively offer individuals ways to strengthen brain function, though by different means. The Serper Method adds a focus on conversation and social interaction. In a perfect world, persons would have the opportunity to take part in both programs.”
Initial Results
Through her company Brain Enhancement Services, Inc., Dr. Serper provides consulting and training services based on her method. She reports that she has been able to stabilize the cognitive abilities of persons with dementia and that two community programs using her method have shown encouraging results, either improving/stabilizing cognitive abilities or increasing socialization.
In addition, Boston University Researchers conducted a six month pilot program to test whether The Serper Method could improve memory and cognitive and social functioning for persons with early-stage Alzheimer’s disease. According to Dr. Serper, focus groups and questionnaires showed that participation improved self-image, conversation, socialization and interest in daily experiences. However, standard neuropsychological tests did not show improved scores for participants. More testing with a larger group is needed to confirm these results.
The Workbooks
“Following my stroke,” Dr. Serper says, “I found that losing access to factual information of the past limited my ability to understand the information of each present day. Reading the newspaper was confusing since I had limited information of past events and struggled with concepts and understanding. It was amazing to me how much of what we all know and learn is based upon the foundations and building blocks that were learned in the past. I felt like all the knowledge and categorization of that knowledge was no longer available to me.” She focused on the foundations she felt she couldn’t access – history and geography – when developing her workbook series.
“The workbooks contain predominantly frustration-free activities,” she says, “with lots of repetition, or memory stimulation, in the form of puzzles, brain twisters and a reference or clue system for answering questions. The goal is exercising different segments of the brain.”
Can persons with early-stage dementia get results by going through the workbook exercises on their own? “I believe that most persons with MCI [Mild Cognitive Impairment] or early-stage dementia will need to be taught how to use The Serper Method over a period of a month or two,” she says. “Individuals with mid-stage dementia will need the assistance of a Cognitive Educator [her trademarked term for someone trained to guide learning sessions based on her method]. Family members can also be trained to guide, if they would like.” CD recordings of the workbooks are available for those with visual, reading or speech limitations.
Whether or not a person with dementia is using her method, Dr. Serper has some advice for them. “Individuals and families should know that learning and socialization does not end with a diagnosis,” she says. “As long as there are healthy brain cells there is hope for enjoying life experiences and increasing life’s vigor and possibilities.“
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I didn’t want to read Lisa Genova’s new book, Still Alice
I opened the book with the idea of skimming it. I wouldn’t get too involved – I’d read just enough to write something up.
An hour and a half later, I finished Still Alice, having read every word. Yes, it’s about Alzheimer’s and a woman’s decline into a terrible fog. But it’s also an ironic look at complicated family relationships, our hopes for future generations and the essence of life.
At the beginning of the book, Alice is exactly my age, smart and driven. One of the ironies is that as her dementia progresses, she becomes kinder and somehow wiser, the way we all hope to be.
Whether or not you or someone in your family has dementia, Still Alice is a great read.
A couple of posts ago, I wrote about a book I really like - Dementia Caregivers Share Their Stories: A Support Group In A Book
The meeting room was jammed. Huge speakers were set up on the porch so that those who couldn’t get a seat in the main room could still hear the presentation. The organizer announced two more sessions would be held the next day to accommodate everyone who had registered in advance.
The caterer added giant gulf shrimp to a tower of pineapples and greenery arranged to look like a palm tree. Attendees filled their glasses from a three-level fountain of punch, and snacked on cheese and chocolate. The mayor arrived.
A real estate pitch? A motivational seminar? No, it was Richard Taylor’s talk on Alzheimer’s last Monday at Arden Courts of Largo, an assisted living facility. Richard, a psychologist diagnosed with “dementia, probably of the Alzheimer’s type” at 58, is one of the most outspoken advocates for those with the disease. His book. Alzheimer's from the Inside Out
Richard Taylor, Ph.D, greets audience members
I had dinner with Richard during the Alzheimer’s Association Public Policy Forum in DC. I read his book, and the St. Petersburg Times article about him. I posted an excerpt from one of his speeches.
But I still wasn’t prepared for the power of his presentation. It’s really a short play based on his book. On Monday, Richard played the person with Alzheimer’s, while a local caregiver read the caregiver’s part. Lisa Milne, Program Specialist from the Alzheimer’s Association - Florida Gulf Coast Chapter, narrated.
“I have become an “It,” Richard says in one scene. “People talk about me, instead of to me.” When he tries to maintain his independence, his family takes away the checkbook and the car. “Don’t worry, we have your best interests at heart. We’ll take care of everything,” the caregiver and the narrator chant in unison.
When the reading was over, and it was time for Richard to take questions, everyone around me was in tears. One by one, caregivers in the audience took the microphone to ask Richard for advice. He was careful to say he can only speak from his own perspective. But he recommended they involve the person with dementia in decision-making about life arrangements and care as much as possible, and gave some examples. He said that hearing about the experience of others in support groups can be helpful. He suggested they try some of the ideas in the book The Best Friends Approach to Alzheimer’s Care.
I wish I could have read Richard’s book and heard him speak while Dad was still alive. Maybe my parents could have gone with me to the presentation. And maybe I would have worried less about what was wrong with my father and worried more about spending time with him.
