Alzheimer's and Brain Awareness Month

Whether they are cared for at home or in an assisted living community, adults living with dementia should be offered a life that is interesting and fun. But what can you do to enhance the everyday experience of a loved one who is losing interest in or is unable to participate in their old hobbies and pursuits?

In Creative Engagement, dementia activity expert Rachael Wonderlin and developmental psychology professor Geri M. Lotze provide dozens of creative, hands-on ways to engage with people living with cognitive loss. Teaching caregivers how to find dementia-friendly daily activities and introduce them into a person's life, this comprehensive, empathetic guide is aimed at both family members and professionals. Twelve chapters full of useful, tangible activities touch on a range of topics, including exercise, technology, cooking and baking, memory games, and arts and crafts.

Focusing on both group and individual dynamics, mundane activities and specially tailored pursuits, Wonderlin and Lotze offer proven strategies for interacting with people living with dementia. The authors include detailed tips for building a dementia-friendly environment, creating a daily calendar, and scheduling community entertainment. They also suggest special activities geared toward people in hospice care and give targeted advice for dealing with caregiver stress.

Drawing on Wonderlin's own practice while incorporating the latest scientific research on dementia and eldercare, Creative Engagement is unique in its dementia-positive approach. Anyone who cares for someone living with dementia will gain valuable knowledge from this compassionate book.

It can be terrifying to witness a loved one’s cognitive decline. But for millions of families around the world, that fear becomes reality year after year. Researchers estimate that more than 150 million people around the world could be living with dementia by 2050. While there is currently no known cure for dementia, Mayo Clinic on Alzheimer’s Disease and Other Dementias combines the latest research on preventive methods, current treatment options, and advice for living well with dementia, to help those affected by the disease.

Traditionally, very little has been known about Alzheimer’s disease and other types of dementias. But recent advances in medical research shine a light on information previously unknown about these debilitating diseases.

In the seventh edition of Mayo Clinic on Alzheimer’s Disease and Other Dementias, expert neurologists from the Mayo Clinic organize this new research into a thorough and digestible guidebook that provides caregivers with the most up-to-date information regarding the disease. The book presents a comprehensive look at the typical symptoms associated with dementia, current findings regarding common causes of the disease, and gives essential tips for managing the day-to-day challenges of caring for someone with dementia.

While Alzheimer’s disease is the most well-known type of dementia, Mayo Clinic on Alzheimer’s Disease and Other Dementias also touches on other types of dementia—like Lewy body dementia, frontotemporal degeneration, and vascular cognitive impairment—and how these conditions are frequently developed.

Additionally, this book provides a transparent look at the neurological changes that can occur within a dementia patient’s brain, and details how to differentiate between the signs of normal aging versus aging with dementia.
Though dementia-related diseases are one of the fastest-growing epidemics in the world, Mayo Clinic on Alzheimer’s Disease and Other Dementias provides an invaluable reference guide on dementia, helping bring peace of mind to those affected by the disease and their caretakers.

Imagine finding a glimmer of good news in a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s.

Imagine how that would change the outlook of the 5 million Americans who suffer from Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias, not to mention their families, loved ones, and caretakers. A neurologist who’s been specializing in dementia and memory loss for more than 20 years, Dr. Gayatri Devi rewrites the story of Alzheimer’s by defining it as a spectrum disorder—like autism, Alzheimer’s is a disease that affects different people differently. She encourages people who are worried about memory impairment to seek a diagnosis because early treatment will enable doctors and caregivers to manage the disease more effectively through drugs and other therapies.

Told through the stories of Dr. Devi’s patients, The Spectrum of Hope humanizes the science, and offers equal parts practical advice and wisdom with skillful ease, along with real hope. Here are chapters on how to maintain independence and dignity; how to fight depression, anxiety, and apathy; how to communicate effectively with a person suffering from dementia. Plus chapters on sexuality, genetics, going public with the diagnosis, even putting together a bucket list—because through her practice, Dr. Devi knows that the majority of Alzheimer’s patients continue to live and work in their communities. They babysit their grandkids, drive to the store (or own the store), serve their clients, or otherwise live fulfilling lives. That’s news that 5 million people are waiting to hear.

“I know where I’m going. I’m still myself. I just can’t remember things as well as I once did. So on short trips, I work hard not to be confused. I’ll say to myself, What are we going to do? How long are we staying? It’s like I’m talking to my other self—the self I used to be. She tells me, This is what we need to buy—not that. I’m conscious of that other self guiding me now.”
 
Restaurateur, magazine publisher, celebrity chef, and nationally known lifestyle maven, B. Smith is struggling at 66 with a tag she never expected to add to that string: Alzheimer's patient.  She’s not alone. Every 67 seconds someone newly develops it, and millions of lives are affected by its aftershocks.
 
B. and her husband, Dan, working with Vanity Fair contributing editor Michael Shnayerson, unstintingly share their unfolding story. Crafted in short chapters that interweave their narrative with practical and helpful advice, readers learn about dealing with Alzheimer's day-to-day challenges: the family realities and tensions, ways of coping, coming research that may tip the scale, as well as lessons learned along the way.
 
At its heart, Before I Forget is a love story: illuminating a love of family, life, and hope.

“Blending the humor, compassion, and absorbing family drama of first-rate memoir with expert science writing, [Sandeep Jauhar] has composed a can’t-miss introduction to what has been called the Age of Alzheimer’s.” ―Sanjay Gupta, author of Keep Sharp and World War C

A deeply affecting memoir of a father’s descent into dementia, and a revelatory inquiry into why the human brain degenerates with age and what we can do about it.

Almost six million Americans―about one in every ten people over the age of sixty-five―have Alzheimer’s disease or a related dementia, and this number is projected to more than double by 2050. What is it like to live with and amid this increasingly prevalent condition, an affliction that some fear more than death? In My Father’s Brain , the distinguished physician and author Sandeep Jauhar sets his father’s struggle with Alzheimer’s alongside his own journey toward understanding this disease and how it might best be coped with, if not cured.

In an intimate memoir rich with humor and heartbreak, Jauhar relates how his immigrant father and extended family felt, quarreled, and found their way through the dissolution of a cherished life. Along the way, he lucidly exposes what happens in the brain as we age and our memory falters, and explores everything from ancient conceptions of the mind to the most cutting-edge neurological―and bioethical―research. Throughout, My Father’s Brain confronts the moral and psychological concerns that arise when family members must become caregivers, when children’s and parents’ roles reverse, and when we must accept unforeseen turns in our closest relationships―and in our understanding of what it is to have a self. The result is a work of essential insight into dementia, and into how scientists, caregivers, and all of us in an aging society are reckoning with the fallout.

An estimated 50 million people in the world suffer from dementia. Diseases such as Alzheimer’s erase parts of one’s memory but are also often said to erase the self. People don’t simply die from such diseases; they are imagined, in the clichés of our era, as vanishing in plain sight, fading away, or enduring a long goodbye. In On Vanishing, Lynn Casteel Harper, a Baptist minister and nursing home chaplain, investigates the myths and metaphors surrounding dementia and aging, addressing not only the indignities caused by the condition but also by the rhetoric surrounding it. Harper asks essential questions about the nature of our outsize fear of dementia, the stigma this fear may create, and what it might mean for us all to try to “vanish well.”

Weaving together personal stories with theology, history, philosophy, literature, and science, Harper confronts our elemental fears of disappearance and death, drawing on her own experiences with people with dementia both in the U.S. health-care system and within her own family. In the course of unpacking her own stories and encounters—of leading a prayer group on a dementia unit; of meeting individuals dismissed as “already gone” and finding them still possessed of complex, vital inner lives; of witnessing her grandfather’s final years with Alzheimer’s and discovering her own heightened genetic risk of succumbing to the disease—Harper engages in an exploration of dementia that is unlike anything written before on the subject.

Expanding our understanding of dementia beyond progressive vacancy and dread, On Vanishing makes room for beauty and hope, and opens a space in which we might start to consider better ways of caring for, and thinking about, our fellow human beings. It is a rich and startling work of nonfiction that reveals cognitive change as an essential aspect of what it means to be mortal.