Dementia Care

Dementia care is a means of supporting the life of a patient with a given disease by other persons who provide all the household, social, hygienic and other needs of a person who is unable to cope with these tasks on their own.

How to deal with the sick

At the very beginning of the manifestation of dementia, many patients do not need outside care, but gradually, along with the development of pathology, sick people can no longer do without help. There are different ways to care for a patient with dementia, when choosing a care option, it is necessary to take into account how each person reacts to the changes taking place with him, and in no case be disrespectful or tactless towards the patient. In the organization of care, it is important to consider that if a person is ashamed of the fact that he needs outside help, this fact should by no means be emphasized. On the contrary, it is necessary to regulate the independence of the patient in every possible way and provide assistance unobtrusively.

In advanced stages of dementia, patients may need a carer with specialized skills and sometimes a medical background. Many patients want to see only a family member next to them, because they are embarrassed by their impotence.

If it is impossible to provide proper home care for the patient, today it is possible to provide him with comfort in a specialized boarding school for patients with similar problems.

When caring for a dementia patient, it is important to provide him with all kinds of moral support, always fulfill his wishes, not make him ashamed of his position or feel discomfort. Communication must be built on an equal footing, in no case should one condescendingly or condescendingly communicate with a sick person, since modesty will aggravate his mental problems even more, which can lead to an exacerbation of the disease.

What to do with a demented person

When planning the leisure and life of people with dementia, it is necessary to create conditions in which patients would be able to show their abilities to the maximum. All classes are carefully thought out and structured in such a way as to maximize the patient’s self-esteem and restore his self-esteem.

Being busy with household chores helps to make a person feel his own importance and the need for a family. However, it is important to remember that with Alzheimer’s disease, shifts in the patient’s consciousness are constantly taking place, not for the better, therefore, when assigning household chores to him, it is important to take into account his everyday condition and in no case irritate or overload him.

It is important to maintain the patient’s past hobbies. If a person has previously drawn beautifully, you can resort to art therapy in everyday life by asking him to draw some plot that he likes. At the same time, the patient should be praised for any result, since the most important thing in this lesson is not he, but the process itself, in which a person can concentrate, structure his own sequence of actions, and come to a specific result. This has a great effect on both the emotional sphere and brain activity.

Diet for dementia

Eating problems with dementia are constantly getting worse. This is due to the progressive inability to remember what and when you can and should eat, which can eventually result in complete atrophy of the chewing and swallowing functions of a person. The main eating difficulties in dementia are:

• inability of patients to recognize food;
• the inability of patients to decide what kind of food they like and want to eat at the moment;
• complete refusal of food;
• refusal to force-feed;
• requirements for inadequate product combinations.

Questions arising from this must be discussed with the attending physician. If the patient’s condition allows, it is better to let him manage the cutlery himself, directing the cutlery placed in the patient’s hand into the mouth. In this process, one should not rush, therefore, it is necessary to allocate a sufficient amount of time each time to feed the patient.

Patients with dementia very often forget about the need for meals or the rules for using cutlery. In severe and advanced stages, a person needs to be spoon-fed. Among the main physical problems when eating, the inability to properly chew or swallow food stands out. A person needs to be constantly reminded of what to eat. It is important to offer him the kind of food that can be easily eaten with your hands. Also, food should be cut very finely so that in the absence of normal chewing it would not be possible to choke on it.

In complex severe stages of dementia, the patient should be fed liquid food that is not too hot, as the patient may not differentiate between hot and cold and burn. In case of problems with the swallowing reflex, it is important that the doctor prescribes the necessary stimulants for such a process.

Patient hygiene

Caring for a patient with dementia necessarily involves monitoring their compliance with personal hygiene rules. The emerging features of the psyche in this disease contribute to the patient’s neglect of these functions.

Be sure to monitor daily how thoroughly the patient washes his hands, genitals, brushes his teeth, and whether he does it in principle. At the same time, observation should be extremely delicate, since many sick people can painfully perceive the presence of another person in the bathroom and demand to leave him alone because of self-esteem.

Exercises for people with dementia

In order to stimulate the cognitive abilities of patients, specialists have developed many games and exercises, performing which the patient partially restores memory, speech, the ability to think and reason, as well as improves the emotional state and self-esteem. Time spent by loved ones with a person with dementia has a healing power for a person.

Among these games, attention should be paid to plasticine modeling, the game of classifying various objects, creating your own book and keeping an autobiographical diary, and board games.

A patient with dementia can be given a plasticine ball and asked to mold something elementary – a dog, a pear, a cake, for example. These actions will help train your hands and will increase the accuracy of coordination of movements. In addition, modeling can be done by the whole family, involving even children in the process, communication with which is extremely necessary for patients with dementia.

You can ask a person with dementia to correctly classify selected objects. For example, you might give the patient a box of buttons and ask them to sort them by size or color. The same can be done with berries, fruits and any other items. This activity will stimulate abstraction, executive functions, and reasoning.

A patient with dementia can be given a pack of magazines in which he will need to find some specific information on a given topic – for example, animals, the sea, food, famous people. After he correctly finds objects in all the proposed magazines, he will have to cut them out and paste them into a notebook, thus creating his own book. This also trains logical thinking and will help to better coordinate movements when cutting.

If the patient likes to write, you can suggest that he create his own autobiographical diary. Each story that the patient remembered correctly can be supplemented with an insert of photographs on this topic. If a person does not like to write, or at the moment it is difficult for him to do this, the same can be done orally – it is enough for him to remember some life stories and find illustrative photographs from the family album for them.

In order to stimulate cognitive functions, you can play various board games with the patient. For this purpose, dominoes, lotto, checkers, monopoly are great. Chess is not the best idea in this case, as it is too complex for the patient with dementia to understand.

Sleep in dementia

Sleep with dementia is often disturbed, a person may not sleep through the night. This is often the hardest part of caring for a patient, because after exhausting the day, the caregiver also needs to rest. In order for these situations to happen as rarely as possible, it is worth not giving the patient a lot of sleep in the middle of the day, but it is better to engage him in physical labor in a feasible mode. Before going to bed, you can go for a long walk with the patient.

Providing a cozy and comfortable bed is a guarantee that the patient will sleep long and soundly. To do this, you need to choose a mattress that matches the preferences of a person, pleasant bedding, and the bedroom needs to be ventilated for a long time in order to enrich the air with oxygen.

Patient safety

The safety of the patient in the home is the main concern in care. All things that he may need must be kept within reach, in order to avoid falls or injuries when trying to find and get them.

Household appliances should also be simple, turn on with one button and not cause difficulties with the choice of modes and other things. At the same time, it is advisable not to let the patient near the source of open fire, it would be better for him to use an electric kettle, which simply turns on and off on its own.

Sometimes dementia patients tend to wander. This is dangerous because a person is able to get lost even in well-known places. To do this, it is necessary to make him some kind of document, which would clearly indicate where he lives and what his name is, and ensure that this document is always with the patient. At a minimum, a note with the address of the person’s residence should be placed in the pocket of their clothes so that they can be helped to get home. All entrance doors should be well locked so that the patient does not suddenly leave. But if suddenly a person is still lost, he does not need to be scolded.

A little trick that distracts the patient from vagrancy can be attaching large mirrors to all doors in the house. The fact is that his reflection distracts the patient from thoughts about leaving home and the intention to open doors.

How to remove aggression

Aggression is not uncommon for patients with dementia. The reasons for aggression in this case can be:

• other parallel diseases;
• despair due to a lack of understanding of his needs by others;
• stress due to physical or mental overstrain.

When communicating with an aggressive patient, one should not show one’s own fear, it is necessary to communicate calmly and evenly, as if nothing is happening. Reciprocal aggression can only aggravate the patient’s condition. Also, one should not stand too close to the patient in a state of aggression, since subconsciously they will perceive this as a threat.

To remove aggression, it is necessary to switch the patient’s attention to some kind of calming activity, or simply wait until the attack of aggression ends. However, all dangerous and heavy objects, such as knives or sticks, should be out of the patient’s reach at the time of aggression.

To further prevent aggression, it is necessary to find out what exactly causes it and try to avoid such prerequisites in the future. With frequent bouts of aggressive behavior, it is necessary to tell the attending physician about this.

treating specialist

The family doctor or internist is the first doctor that patients turn to when they develop signs of dementia. A good general practitioner should have experience working with neurological pathologies in order to timely notice the slightest deviations in the psyche of their patients. If disturbing symptoms occur, the family doctor will refer the patient for a consultation with a neurologist, psychiatrist or geriatrician.

Neurologists are specialized specialists in dementia issues. They can determine the neurological status of the patient, the presence of organic disorders, severe lesions of the central nervous system. The neurologist will prescribe additional diagnostic procedures to establish the causes of the pathology and prescribe its effective therapy.

A neurologist will determine whether the cause of dementia is a complicated somatic disease that affects internal organs in the body, or an infectious process. If yes, then therapy for these diseases is first prescribed, and only then treatment for signs of dementia is prescribed.

If dementia occurs against the background of various brain tumors, then this will require surgical intervention. Neurosurgeons first remove the tumor, and after that, rehabilitation and restorative therapy is carried out, designed to slow the development of dementia.

With further progression of dementia and mental disorders against this background, the patient is treated by a psychiatrist. He is able to determine the slightest changes in the patient’s psyche, conduct a clinical and psychological personal assessment of the patient and identify the stage of severity of cognitive impairment.

With a significant degree of violations, the patient is treated in a psychiatric hospital.

It is the psychiatrist who prescribes the antipsychotic medications that patients with dementia need. He prescribes the dosage, the duration of the course, helps to replace drugs in case of intolerance or addiction.

An elderly patient with dementia may be seen by a geriatrician, a doctor who fights diseases that are characteristic of old age. A geriatrician understands, among other things, diseases of the central nervous system in the elderly, and can prescribe the necessary therapy. A geriatrician usually consults those grandparents who, in addition to dementia, have many other diseases associated with age-related changes in the body.

Institutions for the sick

When dementia progresses and it is too difficult to care for a patient at home, it is possible to use the services of special institutions for patients with dementia. In modern conditions, there are many boarding houses where people with this pathology are cared for at the appropriate level.

They have all the necessary conditions for a comfortable life and provide neurological and psychiatric treatment, as well as psychological counseling. The specialists of these boarding houses provide their patients with a comfortable rehabilitation process.

In many of these institutions, there can be both people who can move independently and take care of themselves, as well as those who are immobilized or require total control. Patients are fed, they are treated, they spend their leisure time, they walk in beautiful parks that belong to the territory of this boarding house. Both patients and their relatives are satisfied with the service and treatment that is provided in such places, therefore, if it is impossible to provide proper home care for the sick, the best way out is to entrust this process to professionals.

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