Grandma was right. She almost always is.
Probably the most convincing piece of science I’ve ever seen. I might not have been so easily convinced before I tried to walk through that closed glass door this morning.
Thank You. When I heard the news and saw this thread, My first thought was along the same lines. I thought I was going to be the first to say something terribly wrong.
I feel bad for him. Losing yourself before you actually depart this world. I can’t imagine anything worse.
I hope for the best for him, as I do for anybody with such a diagnosis.
Well don’t let him drive the bus!
Sorry, it’s very sad. The Partridge Family was serious television for those of a certain age. As I recall it was back to back with the Brady Bunch. Yeesh.
Is there a difference between Alzheimer’s and senile dementia?
I don’t know the answer to that, I can say it is heart wrenching to watch strong, vibrant and sharp people lose their edge and slip away. Anyone who has taken care of an aging parent understands.
Senile dementia is just an umbrella term for any type of dementia that occurs in old age. The Alzheimer’s Association has a list of different types of dementia. Alzheimer’s is the most common.
Yes, but Cassidy has a family history of dementia.
You can have dementia that is not Alzheimer’s. My grandmother lived to be 98 1/2. For the last 18 months or so, she had bad memory lapses and had to move into a nursing home. It was probably a good idea for her health, too. Anyway, there were a couple of times that she left the stove on.
She probably had dementia for about her last three years, but could cope. It was only bad enough for her to need nursing care 18 months after diagnosis (and she probably had it a little while before diagnosis).
However, it was NOT Alzheimer’s. The age on onset was too late, for one thing, and there were features that differentiated it from Alzheimer’s. I don’t remember what they were, but the doctor ran down the list one time. He short term memory was intact, for one thing: it was her ability to multi-task that had failed. So she could look a number up, and remember it to make a phone call just fine, and when people visited, she could keep track of the names of up to three visitors, but more than that, unless she already know them, she couldn’t remember. She also had difficulty with my son’s name, because he would change too much between visits, and she had trouble recognizing him, but she could recognize pictures of him as a baby.
My father also had dementia that didn’t set in until the last maybe two weeks of his life. It was a combination of nerve damage from his cancer (which was a little bit of a blessing, because he couldn’t feel pain anymore), and a head injury he had, because he tried to go to the bathroom on his own, and fell. It really looked like Alzheimer’s, but there were times when he would give the wrong answer to a question, and clearly know it was wrong, but couldn’t say the right word. He told a nurse I was his sister once, and you could see from the look on his face that he knew that was wrong, but he couldn’t come up with the word “daughter.” It was some kind of dysphasia.
So yeah, there are all kinds of dementia that are not Alzheimer’s.
Robin Williams had Lewy body dementia, which is like a cross between Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s, and much worse than either. I consider this, and not suicide, to be his actual cause of death.
Parkinson’s itself can lead to dementia if it progresses far enough. There’s also vascular dementia, which is simply the brain not getting enough of a blood supply to perform all its functions. The prion diseases, like Creutzfeld-Jakob disease, are also a type of dementia.
You’re right, it was back-to-back with The Brady Bunch. Friday night, IIRC.
You can tell the generation gap on my Facebook because anyone younger than 40 has no idea how big a star he was back then.
Wow. I doubt someone with dementia is going to be considered for a liver transplant.
Agreed.
OTOH, liver failure also causes encephalopathy; however, at his age, it’s unlikely that he’d be very high up on the transplant list.
Wow. Given that my need for a liver transplant due to alcoholism will likely accelerate the older I get, this isn’t great news for anyone.
I’d expect it would rule him out as a liver recipient. Uncontrolled/limiting medical conditions are considered to be contraindications to transplant. And losing one’s cognitive abilities to progressive dementia should fall into that category, unless it’s expected that the transplant would cure the dementia (but it would not, in Cassidy’s case).
This is very sad news. While I personally wasn’t a fan, I know he brought a lot of joy to many people.
I read this book http://www.whenweresingin.com about the music from the TV show and records. It said that the top songwriters (Carole King, et al.) and musicians (The Wrecking Crew) always were eager to work with Cassidy because of his incredible work ethic. He didn’t have much of a range but he made up for it in style and perfectionism, and he never, never complained.
I’d heard that too.
I was a Partridge Family superfan when I was like, 6, 7, & 8. I knew all the words to all their songs. My friends and I used to choreograph elaborate dances to them. When I changed schools, they suddenly weren’t cool anymore, so no more dancing with my friends, but I still used to listen in my room. About 20 years ago, I bought their CD for the nostalgia.
I recently caught an episode of the show, and it dawned on me for the first time that they weren’t rock stars-- they were lounge singers! When I watched the show when I was six, I thought they were rock stars! Oh well.
Also, all the commercials were for reverse mortgages, and dental implants, instead of Tiger Beat and the Ronco rhinestone and stud setter. The exact same audience was watching, 40 years later.
Many of my friends in junior high had crushes on Cassidy. The Partridge Family, along with The Brady Bunch, were pretty big deals and if you didn’t watch them woe be you in school the following Monday (I know TBB was on Fridays, memory tells me that TPF followed it).
I think I said somewhere around here that he appeared on (god help me) Celebrity Apprentice a few years ago and had to keep calling his daughter Katie for help because he couldn’t comprehend the assignments. I recall some kind of fundraiser where they were supposed to rally their celebrity fan base and he was on the phone to her almost crying that he had nobody he could call, could she please put out the word for him? It was clear something was going on with him. It was sad.
I’m glad you posted that, thank you.