What Stage Is He In????

Malka

My dad, 95, now does not recognize his own apartment where he has lived for over 50 years. Is this a late stage development? I still cannot figure this stuff out.

M

scoutmom405

https://www.tamcummings.com/tools

this really helped me see what stage my FIL is. I printed it & discussed it with his neurologist & primary.

irene912

https://alzconnected.org/discussion/68224/what-stage-is-he-in

I used to be concerned with what my mom's 'diagnosis' is. Mild cognitive impairment I heard from a neurologist. I thought, MILD? I think it's just a 'label' they use. I realized, does it matter? Just concentrate on being sure he's safe & that you're caring for yourself so you can be there for him. This is just my opinion.

Emily 123

Irene, I think they use the three-stage, but it's not nearly nuanced enough. There's a huge difference between a clinician's view and a lived experience of what's 'mild' and 'moderate', isn't there?

Malka, when you use that DBAT checklist (for Alzheimer's) your dad may not 'check' every box in each stage, but you will see some of those behaviors. Some abilities may never be lost until the very end, and people can 'straddle' a stage for a while. Since you have to build care around the most severe behavior, the advice is to count the farthest stage where a behavior is cropping up. A 50 year loss sounds severe, but the staging depends on what he physically can or can't do, because it uses things we observe to correlate to how much loss of function there is. What physical things on the checklist is he doing?

Anonymousjpl123

The checklist helped me so much. You can read through it and have a sense of where your dad’s symptoms - like not recognizing his apartment - fall along the continuum.

It may help give you a sense of where he is and where he is going, although truly everyone is different.

I was convinced my mom had something other than Alzheimer’s because her progression seemed so extreme and rapid. It turns out her Alzheimer’s just looks different than what others describe in some ways. But the checklist was on target. Really helped give perspective.