medication control

From the AP:

“Claire Dinneen’s daughters thought that worsening dementia was causing her growing confusion, but her doctor suspected something else.

Dr. Pei Chen asked them to round up medicines in the 89-year-old woman’s home and they returned with a huge haul. There were 28 drugs ordered by various doctors for various ailments, plus over-the-counter medicines. Chen spent a year sorting out which ones were truly needed and trimmed a dozen.

To her daughters’ surprise, Dinneen got better, able to remember more things and to offer advice on what to wear and how to raise their kids. Her symptoms were from “medication fog,” not her dementia getting worse, Chen told one daughter.”

Claire’s situation may be an outlier, but there’s no question many seniors are on a lot of medications & supplements. Often these drugs are prescribed by several different doctors who don’t communicate with one another. It’s essential that you sit down with your senior loved ones regularly and go over the medication regimens they’re on. Make a chart or spreadsheet detailing all of the drugs and supplements they take, what they treat, who prescribed them, and when they began taking it. At their next appointment with their primary care physician, make sure that the chart or spreadsheet is discussed. It’s possible there are drugs there which should be stopped or even ones which may be having harmful interactions.

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While the days are starting to get longer, it’s still wintering out in the northern hemisphere. That means millions of people are suffering from Seasonal Depression or Seasonal Affective Disorder. These are more than just the ‘winter blues. These are conditions that induce demonstrable physiological changes in the human body. But there are ways to help battle SAD and related conditions, one of which being Light Therapy. This therapy involves sitting with a lightbox that mimics natural light for moderate periods each day. Therapeutic lightboxes are designed to provide an experience as close to natural sunlight as possible, while also blocking harmful UV rays. The light should be situated somewhere off to the side, rather than directly ahead, and should be moved regularly so all sides of your body get the benefits. Light therapy should not be overused, and you should be wary of warning signs like nausea or eye fatigue.

The Mayo Clinic has some more quick tips for beginning Light Therapy at home

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A new study in the journal Neuroscience shows that patients taking a class of diabetes drug known as gliptins may help stave off Alzheimer’s disease.

“This new research looked at a particular class of diabetes drugs called dipeptidyl peptidase 4 inhibitors (DPP-4i), also known as gliptins. Using retrospective data the researchers compared brain scans and cognitive test results from 70 diabetic patients taking DPP-4i against 71 diabetic patients not taking DPP-4i and 141 non-diabetic subjects. The entire cohort had an average age of 76 and all showed early signs of Alzheimer’s disease based on cognitive tests and PET scans.

All subjects were followed for around six years to measure decline over time and cognitive scores were similar in all groups at the start of the study. At the end of the study period, those diabetic patients on DPP-4i drugs showed significantly slower rates of cognitive decline compared to both other groups.”

The results are very preliminary, but the findings seem to be strong enough to warrant a large-scale study into these effects.

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