Library Footage. Hal Rhodes Interviews Caregivers

All right, tell me who I am. Folks, thank you very much. Thank you. Do you have some pick -up questions? I don't know, I think I got. Beyond the needs of the caregiver, be it the husband or son or the daughter, whomever, the person with Alzheimer needs care that sometimes can't be provided in the home. What do they need? What kind of help is available? The kind of help that's available in most communities, we have an albuquerque respite care, which is there are daycare centers that patients can be taken to for activities and for care during the day. Involving nourishment and so on, there are also full -time 24 -hour care that can be provided. Respect can also be provided on a one or two -week

basis in some long -term care facilities that are available in New Mexico and albuquerque. Are they expensive? They are expensive, they are expensive. Long -term care is expensive and it is not covered by Medicare. Or most insurance companies do not cover long -term care. Do you find that incredible? Yes, yes, it is. I do too. All right, now then. A little editorial there, maybe? No. I don't think there's any maybe about it. No. Dr. Blankley, let's talk about the stages of memory loss. I'm told a person loses their memory in the reverse order they acquired it. How does it work? Basically,

I think you're right. There's been a lot of research recently trying to figure out, first of all, how to quantitate the disease by looking at the stages of the illness. I think what's come out of that is the fact that we recognize that we lose those memories that we've gained most recently early on in the disease. I think that's why the ability to calculate the ability to change fractions and the like were early lost early. Those are things that were learned later in life. And then what happens with the disease, and you can think of it, I guess, as kind of an onion, as we're growing the onion grows. And then as the disease takes its effect, you start peeling those layers back. The outer layer may have been the calculations, then you get down to the other layers of the illness. All the way back through all the specific memories and learn tasks that we developed in our developmental stages and childhood. And it's an amazing process to watch. We've focused on graining those as opposed to losing them. I think we're unfortunately going to have to focus on losing them now with Alzheimer's. I've heard, I don't know if there's true or not, that the last thing before death is that the

brain forgets to communicate to the body to breathe. Is that true? I think that's a possibility. Certainly, the parts of the brain that are affected with Alzheimer's are what we consider the higher levels of thought, we stirly on tasks that we've learned and things like that. As the illness progresses down to the end, there seems to be an involvement in that. I would have to say probably the cause of death as perceived by most physicians would be indirectly related. For example, if you can't swallow effectively, you potentially could aspirate or breathe in food or liquids into the lungs developing pneumonia and die of the pneumonia. It's kind of indirectly related to the disease itself, but the disease doesn't specifically cause the pneumonia or the cessation of respiration. Same thing happens with gloss control of the bowel and bladder. You have to eventually catheterize the bladder in order to keep the individual from losing that control. Unfortunately, every time a catheter is placed, there's a chance of a bladder infection which then can go into a systemic

infection, infection leading to death. So the disease causes the need for an intervention or causes some of their illness, which then the patient succumbs to. Without the disease, the patient wouldn't necessarily succumb to that illness. Thank you, Goddard.