Featured Article: Memories Impact How Alzheimer’s Patients Think, Feel and Act
By: Bob DeMarco Alzheimer’s Reading Room
Alzheimer’s caregivers can have a profound influence on the emotional state of individuals with living with dementia. In short, while patients living with Alzheimer’s disease might not remember recent events, they can still remember how events in their lives made them feel.
I hope you will take the time to read and absorb the information in the research summary presented below. This is both good and important new for caregivers and those in the healthcare industry that work with patients living with dementia.
It is my belief that each and every action we perform as caregivers has a cumulative effect on the behavior and mental well being of our loved one’s living with dementia.
We can change the way an Alzheimer’s person behaves, how they interact with us, and we can change their overall demeanor. This is accomplished in part by engaging in activities that bring positive emotional experiences into the lives of those who are deeply forgetful.
Even something as simple as a toy repeat parrot brought happiness into the life of my mother, Dotty, who lived with Alzheimer’s disease. He made her laugh and smile, and he interacted with her in what was a real and meaningful way. This translated into positive emotion and a better life experience for both of us.
Please consider these important findings and conclusions from the study.
The fact that forgotten events can continue to exert a profound influence on a patient’s emotional life highlights the need for caregivers to avoid causing negative feelings and to try to induce positive feelings.
“Our findings should empower caregivers by showing them that their actions toward patients really do matter.”
“Frequent visits and social interactions, exercise, music, dance, jokes, and serving patients their favorite foods are all simple things that can have a lasting emotional impact on a patient’s quality of life and subjective well-being.”
Alzheimer’s patients can still feel the emotion long after the memories have vanished
The Gist
A University of Iowa study further supports an inescapable message:
Caregivers can have a profound influence—good or bad—on the emotional state of individuals with Alzheimer’s disease.
People with Alzheimer’s may not remember a recent visit by a loved one or having been neglected by staff at a nursing home, but those actions can have a lasting impact on how they feel.
- The findings of this study are published in the September 2014 issue of the journal Cognitive and Behavioral Neurology, and can be viewed online at no cost.
UI researchers showed individuals with Alzheimer’s disease clips of sad and happy movies. The patients experienced sustained states of sadness and happiness despite not being able to remember the movies.
“This confirms that the emotional life of an Alzheimer’s patient is alive and well,” says lead author Edmarie Guzmán-Vélez. - Guzmán-Vélez conducted the study with Daniel Tranel, UI professor of neurology and psychology, and Justin Feinstein, assistant professor at the University of Tulsa and the Laureate Institute for Brain Research.
- Tranel and Feinstein published a paper in 2010 that predicted the importance of attending to the emotional needs of people with Alzheimer’s, which is expected to affect as many as 16 million people in the United States by 2050 and cost an estimated $1.2 trillion.
“It’s extremely important to see data that support our previous prediction,” Tranel says. “Edmarie’s research has immediate implications for how we treat patients and how we teach caregivers.”
The Findings
Despite the considerable amount of research aimed at finding new treatments for Alzheimer’s, no drug has succeeded at either preventing or substantially influencing the disease’s progression.
- Against this foreboding backdrop, the results of this study highlight the need to develop new care-giving techniques aimed at improving the well-being and minimizing the suffering for the millions of individuals afflicted with Alzheimer’s.
- For this behavioral study, Guzmán-Vélez and her colleagues invited 17 patients with Alzheimer’s disease and 17 healthy comparison participants to view 20 minutes of sad and then happy movies.
- These movie clips triggered the expected emotion: sorrow and tears during the sad films and laughter during the happy ones.
- About five minutes after watching the movies, the researchers gave participants a memory test to see if they could recall what they had just seen.
- As expected, the patients with Alzheimer’s disease retained significantly less information about both the sad and happy films than the healthy people.
- In fact, four patients were unable to recall any factual information about the films, and one patient didn’t even remember watching any movies.
- Before and after seeing the films, participants answered questions to gauge their feelings. Patients with Alzheimer’s disease reported elevated levels of either sadness or happiness for up to 30 minutes after viewing the films despite having little or no recollection of the movies.
Quite strikingly, the less the patients remembered about the films, the longer their sadness lasted.
The Conclusions
While sadness tended to last a little longer than happiness, both emotions far outlasted the memory of the films.
The fact that forgotten events can continue to exert a profound influence on a patient’s emotional life highlights the need for caregivers to avoid causing negative feelings and to try to induce positive feelings.
“Our findings should empower caregivers by showing them that their actions toward patients really do matter,” says Guzmán-Vélez, who was a Summer Research Opportunities Program student in 2008.
“Frequent visits and social interactions, exercise, music, dance, jokes, and serving patients their favorite foods are all simple things that can have a lasting emotional impact on a patient’s quality of life and subjective well-being.”
Bob DeMarco is the Founder of the Alzheimer’s Reading Room (ARR). Bob is a recognized expert, writer, speaker, and influencer in the Alzheimer’s and Dementia Community worldwide. The ARR Knowledge Base contains more than 4,500 articles. Bob was a caregiver for his mother Dotty for 8 years until her death in 2012. He lives in Delray Beach, FL. ■