“How do people actually die from Alzheimer?”
In: Biology
Not a doctor, just worked in an old folks home, with a dementia floor:
Alzheimer’s and other dementia disorders don’t just affect memory – it’s the whole brain that’s affected. So, they begin doing things like forgetting to, or refusing to, eat. The part of the system that tells them they’re hungry just isn’t functioning, and it’s really difficult to convince them they need food. A lot of the dementia residents I worked with ended up painfully skinny, because we just couldn’t get enough food into them. They’d pull out feeding tubes, too. Refusal to drink led to dehydration, and in some cases, kidney failure.
Loss of motor skills/balance meant a lot of falls, a lot of broken bones, a lot of bumps and bruises and cuts that didn’t heal properly, and led to infections. If someone had a broken hip, and was on bed rest while they healed, they were at risk for bed sores, which are another vector for infection. Same for pneumonias – as patients lost their ability to swallow properly, they’d end up getting spit and food particles into their lungs. Do that long enough, and they’d get pneumonia.
Loss of cognitive skills – Like the patient that escaped from his son’s house when they’d taken him home for Thanksgiving, and he was hit by a car. He’d just walked out the front door in the middle of the night, in his jammies and slippers, and wandered into traffic. Or, the patient that had intense delusions that everyone was trying to kill her. She wouldn’t eat (cause we were poisoning her), was combative with the care staff (biting, spitting, flinging poop, swinging her cane), and would often hurt herself trying to hide from the staff (like trying to climb onto the top shelf in her closet, and falling). She no longer operated in the same reality as the rest of us, and couldn’t be reasoned with, and ended up hurting herself a lot. She also broke a nursing aides nose with the cane. We couldn’t render a lot of the care she clearly needed, because she was too combative to approach.
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