Saving Your Brain by Dr. Kelly Miller hits #1 on the Amazon.com Brain Diseases Best Sellers List. Saving Your Brain explains how genetics, lifestyle choices, and environmental hazards contribute to the development of Alzheimer’s, dementia and other brain diseases. In response to the book hitting #1, Dr. Miller said, “I am very excited about the response to the book. Dr. Miller is the author of seven health-related books. Saving Your Brain: Causes, Prevention, and Reversal of Dementia/Alzheimer’s is available on Amazon.com at https://www.amazon.com/Saving-Your-Brain-PreventionFor more information about Dr. Miller go to http://www.drkellymiller.com
Posts tagged as “Dementia”
At Mill View, we continually ask residents what they would like to see. We have a fully functioning vintage corner shop, a cinema and a library – all inspired by our residents.Most recently, our residents said they wanted more spaces to spend time with friends and family, so we offered a range of options: a vintage tea shop, a cafe or a 1950s diner. Residents chose a diner, and after 18 months of fundraising, planning and construction, we opened the Pitstop in May – with an Elvis impersonator in attendance. The diner features bright booth tables, an old rotary telephone, jukebox, milkshake machines and a display of period advertisement signs. All these projects provide valuable spaces for our residents to reminisce; they can continue to do the things they used to love, such as watching a film or meeting friends for lunch. These areas also work well for reminiscence therapy, which uses nostalgic surroundings to help stimulate memories and conversations for those living with dementia. The familiarity helps to put residents at ease, so they can focus on talking about happy memories.
Hannah Flamm wrote for the Washington Post (8/10) about antipsychotic use in nursing homes for dementia patients, saying their use “as chemical restraints – for staff convenience or to ‘discipline’ a resident – has a long history in nursing homes,” and that for “more than a decade, the Food and Drug Administration has required manufacturers to place the strongest caution...on the packaging to advise against the medicines’ use in these patients.” These drugs “almost double the risk of death for them and have never been approved as safe or effective for treating symptoms of dementia,” but despite that “warning, nursing homes still often administer antipsychotic drugs in this manner, sometimes without seeking informed consent first,” Flamm said.
The American Psychiatric Association has “conclude[d] that the drugs offer ‘at best small’ potential benefits...while ‘on the whole, there is consistent evidence that antipsychotics are associated with clinically significant adverse effects, including mortality.’”
After experiencing the world as a woman with Alzheimer’s disease, Ana Lebron took off her virtual reality headset and began to cry. She couldn’t pinpoint which part of the experience left her in tears. After all, she works with Alzheimer’s patients every day as an activities coordinator at assisted living facility Hartwell Place in Andersonville. But when she put on that headset and tried to navigate a virtual grocery store, the lights were overpowering, and the food labels were fuzzy. When people spoke to her, their words were distorted. Her virtual family members shot her frustrated glances before they understood why she kept forgetting holidays, faces and how to cook. “This brings it home even more,” Lebron, said of the experience.
As the disease gets worse, pressure is placed on the family to make important decisions for the individual to keep them safe. "My dad carried a gun on him all the time. It was who he was. Taking that away was like taking away part of his identity," Carla Rafferty said. For Carla's family, taking away her dad's gun was a process. She said the family didn't want him to know what was going, so the first thing they did was take the bullets out of his gun, then they put a lock on it. Eventually, her dad forgot how important that gun was to him. If you aren't ready to remove the guns from the house, Alzheimer's Tennessee recommends putting them in a safe place like a gun safe or a secure location.
Henk Blanken (The difficulty of dying well, 10 August) suggests that the responsibility for authorising euthanasia should lie with a “loved one”.
My elderly mother coped with my father’s progressing dementia for six years, though the task was becoming impossible, because she could not bear to place him in a dementia unit.
Yet without very specific contrary instructions in a living will/advance decision, resuscitation and active treatment are medicine’s default positions.
Dementia is unique in that any request for Medical Aid in Dying must be made early in the disease, before capacity is lost.
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For about half of people with dementia, the condition goes undetected, a problem that poses a major barrier to treatment. But a new study suggests that machine learning can help identify dementia more accurately than humans.Using data from 25,000 patients, researchers built a machine-learning model that accurately classified patients with dementia 84 percent of the time. What’s more, the tech pinged five people who had dementia but had not yet received a diagnosis. What does this mean for the future of dementia care and the world at large? When Apple overtook Fitbit in the wearables market, the dethroned king had to make some big moves. And it did.Over the past year or so, Fitbit has struck a number of deals with health insurance companies, health systems and other organizations. Its increased focus on enterprise health could prove a shot in the arm, which could be bolstered by a secondary campaign centered on clinical data.
"Conversations about neuroscience can overwhelm me, and medical references to the way our brain works tend to lose me in a cloud of scientific terminology. Personally, I would rather discuss the social aspects of aging issues, yet I also know it’s helpful to grasp the complexities of the brain when caring for individuals with dementia.Fortunately, I’ve recently come across a neuroscientist who is able to make scientific brain lingo very relatable.
Dr. Wendy Suzuki’s engaging and conversational approach to understanding the brain in her book, “Happy Brain, Happy Life: A Personal Program to Activate Your Brain & Do Everything Better,” connects neuroscience with everyday references.
I highly recommend either reading or listening to her book, or viewing Dr. Suzuki’s TEDWomen talk about the brain-changing benefits of exercise.
Something new or unusual is effective because our brains respond to new stimuli as a way to protect us.
Dr. Suzuki also helps to clarify the difference between dementia and Alzheimer’s disease."
Though most of us don’t consider ourselves artists, we should still make time to create now and again. Not only does art allow us to express our feelings and emotions in ways that words can’t, we can manage our feelings and emotions through art. As we create, we’re forced to focus on the task at hand, freeing our minds of worry, anger and stress. The repetitive movements of painting, drawing and sculpting also help us feel at ease. As dementia progresses and cognitive abilities decline, art is the perfect medium for non-verbal engagement....
It’s OK to ask for help.”Q&AHere's a Q&A with Gretchen Halstead, service excellence officer at Westchester Medical Center, the flagship of the Westchester Medical Center Health Network, about caregiver services they offer. “People generally start care-giving by taking their mom or dad or spouse or neighbor to a medical appointment and, over time, as that person’s health deteriorates, they are taking on more and more responsibilities such as administering injections, tube feeding, wound care, helping with dressing and bathing, along with managing finances with little support,” Accius said. A “majority of these people are also working, and they have to juggle work and care-giving responsibilities. It is a very stressful situation because they are caring for someone they love.”