Alzheimer’s Disease Stages: How to Help Your Senior

Unfortunately, there are many people who have a loved one with Alzheimer’s disease. While this disease is exceedingly difficult on the elderly person, it can take a significant toll on their loved ones too. If your elderly loved one has this disease, you may want to do everything in your capacity to help them. There are numerous ways that you can go about doing that.

Helping in the Early Stage

When your elderly loved one first gets Alzheimer’s disease, they likely won’t even be diagnosed yet. Many people aren’t diagnosed until they are in the mid to late stages. Usually, the early stage lasts around 2-4 years.

During the early stage, your elderly loved one may:

• Not need a lot of help
• Won’t need daily or even regular supervision
• Can still attend events, do activities, and perform basic tasks
• Can still remember many things, but may start to struggle
• Could have troubles with focusing and remembering to take medications

Now that you know what your elderly loved one may be going through during this stage, you may be wondering how you can help them. Some ways you and home care assistance providers can do that are to give medication reminders, help with household organization, and go with your elderly loved one to their doctor’s appointments. It may also be beneficial to help your elderly loved one cope with the disease diagnosis.

Mid Stage Alzheimer’s Disease

This stage of the disease generally lasts around 2-10 years. During the middle stage of this disease, your elderly loved one will start to need more help. The disease will start impacting them more severely. Some things that may go on with your elderly loved one during this stage include:

• Worsened memory issues
• Forgetting who their loved ones are
• Forgetting familiar places
• Not knowing what time or what day it is
• Having some erratic behaviors
• Becoming aggressive
• Having some physical and coordination problems

As you can tell from this list, the difficulties will become increasingly worse. You and home care assistance providers will need to help your elderly loved one regularly or even daily at this point. Your elderly loved one will need transportation, medication reminders, meals made, and many other types of help.

Final Stage of the Disease

The final stage of Alzheimer’s disease usually lasts around 1-3 years. Sometimes, it can last a bit longer. During this stage, your elderly loved one is going to need care all the time. You may want to highly consider hiring home care providers as providing all the care yourself can take a huge toll on your own health.

During this stage, your elderly loved one will experience:

• Complete memory loss
• Not knowing who anyone is
• Can’t process information
• Can’t communicate coherently
• Erratic and troubling behaviors
• Becoming very unpredictable
• Delusions or hallucinations
• At this point, your elderly loved one needs help with everything.

Conclusion

Now that you are aware of what your elderly loved one will experience during the different stages of Alzheimer’s disease, you can be better prepared for how to help them.

Sources
https://www.alz.org/alzheimers-dementia/stages