A friend of mine who is a psychotherapist asserts that generally Alzheimer’s Disease unravels the mind from the present backwards- while it’s not a linear degeneration, generally your most recent memories will be the first to be affected, then your memories of middle age, etc., with your memories of childhood being the most resistant. I have not found anything in any literature to corroborate this- has anybody else heard this theory?
Pronounced spee-JENKS, it was the name of my grandfather’s white cat. My sister asked me recently what it meant and I have no idea; Googling yields nothing. My grandfather wasn’t particularly well read but he did travel fairly widely in Europe (first as a soldier in WW1 and later as a railroad bridge builder in the last days of WW2) though I’ve no idea if this is where he encountered the name.
Not a majorly important query, but just curious.
Uh… speaking of mental deterioration=== that was to be another thread.
IANAD, but my mother is suffering from Alzheimer’s; having spoken to a doctor about it, that’s basically what he told me. The way he put it was not so much that the patient forgets things as much as they fail to remember new things.
I hadn’t realized that beforehand, but it really does fit. At this point, she’s well aware of her surroundings and her past, but don’t ask her what she did yesterday, or what she might be doing tomorrow.
Not that you’ve asked, but of all the things that suck in this world (and yeah, I’ve seen plenty of them), this disease is right up there on the top of the suck list 
My dad has it and is pretty cognizant of most things, but he does weird things like putting pretzels in the freezer, or putting a dirty coffee mug up in the cupboard, or just forgetting things from a few minutes ago. Sometimes he can remember what year this is or the president’s name, and sometimes not.
He still has pretty vivid memories of stuff from way back, though.
He had been on Aricept and then Namenda for a while, but apparently they reached some sort of toxicity level (?), because they rendered him sick and unable to eat until he got off of them. Damn shame, because I don’t think there are any other meds for it.
So…I make sure he gets lots of blueberries, and vitamins E and B12. They might help and not cause side effects.
When my grandfather was nearing the end and was having fits of dementia and hallucinations, I could bring him back by having him tell me sotries from his days in the Coast Guard during WWII. He would start recounting the story, and by the time he finished he would be “with us” again. Luckily(?) he was in the mildly forgetful stage for most of the time - most people couldn’t even tell the difference - he was always a bit fuzzy-headed :). He was in the dementia/hallucinatory stage for only a couple of months before he passed away - but those were the toughest two months of my life, because apparently no one else in my family had the ability to “bring him back” - or at least no one but me enjoyed hearing all his stories from the past over and over again. Up until the final day he could recount each of the hotel properties he had developed, how many rooms they had, even their street addresses (he retired from the hotel development buisness back in the early 80s, and passed away in 2001), but could never remember where he had left his wallet(even when it was already in his back pocket), so from a purely anectodal standpoint my oberservations matched that of the doctor in the OP
Yeah, it really, really is.
I too have anecdotal information that supports this claim, but I decided to look for a few cites.
Retrograde amnesia in patients with Alzheimer’s disease or Huntington’s disease.
RA = Retrograde amnesia, AD = Alzheimer’s, HD = Huntington’s
Remote memory function in Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s disease
However, further digging reveals that things might not be so simple:
RETRIEVAL OF EPISODIC AND SEMANTIC AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL MEMORIES IN EARLY ALZHEIMER’S DISEASE AND SEMANTIC DEMENTIA (pdf!)
From what I’ve read, including the cites above, Ribot’s gradient/law/effect (older memories are the most resilient) generally holds true for AD sufferers but there is noticeable difference between semantic and episodic memory. Episodic memories are those that relate to specific events, while semantic memory is that of general concepts.
Oh, and I must emphatically agree with the above. It’s like seeing a loved one being slowly erased from existence. Maybe it’s because it really hit close to home, but I’m getting sort of choked up just thinking about it.
jovan’s post is properly founded. This note is my own understanding of the mechanism of the memory loss in Alzheimer’s, based on its occurence with my mother, and my own search for information.
It seems that new items appear in the current-attention (short-term memory) part of the mind, and then are written to “permanent” memory. Alzheimer’s seems to interfere with the writing, or is a problem with the short-term memory.
Several caretakers that I know of, including myself, became convinced they had early AD, but on hindsight it seems that stress, tiredness, interruptions, multiple demands for attention, multiple responsibilities, worry, unexpected changes, and illness all interfere with writing to memory, especially if these factors appear in combination of two or more. So the caretaker gets “contact Alzheimer’s.”
To the person with AD, the concept of the coffee cup being dirty gets lost before the cup gets put where it (might) belong, or the mind might wander a bit and a thought concerning the freezer comes up before the pretzel action is completed. Or the ability to do a comparison (this shirt or that?) goes, because the current attention can’t hold both concepts at once in order to compare.
One assumes that the write-to-memory issue begins to occur slowly over time, so that memories of a few years ago were less reliably recorded than those of youth.
From what I understand, a prevalent hypothesis/theory in memory research is that of memory consolidation. Very roughly, the longer a memory is stored, the more solidly anchored it becomes. The “gradients” of retrograde amnesia in AD patients is brought up to support this phenomenon. Here’s an article that deals with the topic.
One thing I was delighted to find in the research I did was that while early onset Alzheimers (i.e. before 60- which accounts for about 10% of cases) seems to be hereditable, there is no major evidence to support that the main disease (which comprises 90% of cases) is particularly liable to run in families. This I’m sharing with my mother who is currently 70 and who is majorly terrified of developing the disease (her mother did, her father [who lived to be much older] didn’t)- it’s actually a reason she will not quit smoking (there is some evidence that nicotine delays the onset of Alzheimer’s) even though it’s destroyed her health in most other ways.
I hate to hear of anybody having this disease. My deepest codolences to you and your family.
My dad and I both noticed that mom seemed to “go back in time”, or re-live memories farther and farther back. This was after she was well into it, she never started mentioning things from her long ago past until she had pretty much stopped recognizing us. The one exception, I have a small dog who she really adored. She recognized my dog when she was very far along. He had a pronounced calming effect on her. Or maybe she just liked a dog in general. I just kills us not knowing how much she was actually aware of vs what she could articulate to us. Dreadful disease for everybody involved.
This is truly a horrifying and heartbreaking disease, the stealing away of loved ones by slow, painful degrees, not only mentally but physically. My mother suffered from this disease for the last six years of her life. I can’t offer any cites. I can only speak from my own experience. One thing that some people don’t realize is the disease can cause radical emotional changes as well. My mom went from being fairly happy and cheerful (I miss hearing her whistle…) and somewhat stoic to being depressed and weepy.
I remember sitting with her one day when she asked me where her mother had gone. (Her mother had died 20+ years earlier.) Of all the unusual questions she had asked, that was one that had caught me completely off guard. I knew damn sure I wasn’t going to tell her, “Oh, I’m sorry, Mom, but your mother died years ago.” The only thing I could think of was to tell her that her mother had to go take care of something but would be back soon.
As my mother’s disease steadily worsened, she began to lose the ability to speak English, communicating only in German (her native language). None of us children ever learned to speak German and would have to rely upon friends to decipher what she was saying. Very soon, however, her language (though it still sounded German to me…I suspect she was still able to speak some words in her native tongue) slipped basically into gibberish and communicating became guesswork. I’m grateful that, even though she did regress in her memories, she didn’t end up reliving some really horrible ones (she was a teenager in Munich during WWII). I’m not sure how any of us could have dealt with telling her that no, the building is not being bombed.
But sometimes, in the middle of all those terrible days of watching her regress, losing all her most recent memories (and I was her youngest child…), she would have moments of clarity. Those are treasures to me and I thank God for them.
My heart goes out to anyone who has a family member or loved one suffering from this disease.
The above reminds me of a friend whose father emigrated from Italy to Alabama (odd move) as a small child. He spoke only Italian until he was about 4-5, then he spoke accented English but still thought in Italian for a while, eventually he spoke fluent English with even a slight southern accent, and ultimately (after his parents were dead [and they died while he was young] he couldn’t remember more than a sentence or two in Italian.
When he developed Alzheimer’s Italian words began returning to his sentences and some days he spoke nothing but Italian (which none of his family knew [plus he was an Italian peasant born before WW1 so it probably was an obscure dialect anyway]). Ultimately he was non-verbal, but I always thougt it intriguing that he had that language filed away in his mind all those many years.
My brother in law is only in his late 40s and doesn’t have Alzheimer’s but he had a stroke two years ago. For weeks he was “stuck” in the 1980s- every point of reference he had (his house, his family, his city of residence, his dog, etc.) was about 15 years out of date. He would not recognized people he’d met since the early 1990s, and while he knew who I was (he’s known me since I was a kid) he kept asking “when’d you grow the beard?” and “what have you done to yourself” because he was obviously remembering me as a teenager from the 1980s rather than as a 30-something guy with a beard. (His wife, my sister, has barely changed a day in 20 years and this didn’t confuse him.) It took him forever to remember that his mother and grandmother were dead (they both died in the three years before his stroke), and no sooner would he remember than he’d forget again. Two years later he’s a bit more indecisive than he once was and his voice is slightly different but he’s otherwise recovered.
Right–more recent research seems to indicate that memories are stored in lots of places (lots of copies), and generally the longer you have them, the more copies you have in various places–so the less likely they are to be destroyed by Alzheimer’s (at least right away).
It’s not “hereditable” – if you have the gene for ‘early onset’ you’re getting Alzheimers and you’re getting the ‘early onset’ variety.