Antipsychotic drugs affecting Alzheimer patient my mom

melmichigan

my mom is in stage 4 1/2 of the seven stages of Alzheimer’s. She was normal forgetful didn’t really have major sundowning, but we’ll just hang ou, eight fine and sometimes and sometimes slept a lot. Her blood pressure went low. We sent her to the hospital. They sent her to rehab for three weeks, but went home eventually my sister couldn’t takexare if her after doing it for 3 years she is 69 and my brother-in-law 71. So a month ago my mom was put into a nursing home for rehab, but since my sister can’t take care of her very we decided to keep her there because we thought the people seemed nice and they take care of the people there well but to get her to sleep better, they gave her antihistamine. We told don’t do that because my mom will have a reaction. It will cause hallucinations and delusions, but they gave it to her anyway. So my mom has heart failure, kidney failure, and Alzheimer’s unsteady on her feet as normal, but was eating well and everything. After they gave her the antihistamine and she started hallucinating, getting more aggressive, more confused, and agitated. We asked them to stop the antihistamine, but they said she acted up at night. Well, of course she did because they gave her the antihistamine. So this has sent everything on a downward spiral.

Since we told them not to give her the antihistamine, they did another thing and ended up giving her Seroquel. Well Seroquel with people with Alzheimer’s accentuates, the agitation, confusion, and hallucinations and delusions. On top of making them completely out of it. It made her potassium high and she was having all kinds of other issues so she went to the hospital Now we’re trying to get her off Seroquel, which is an antipsychotic which she does not need and she’s never been that way they were saying giving her meds to go to sleep. Another way of drugging the patients to keep them under their control.
Long story short we go to the hospital, we asked them to detox her off the Seroquel and let her get back to normal with her normal pills which were working. They decided to give her a different medication now this medication is keeping her in a state where she can’t hold a fork can’t feed herself. She can’t hold a cup to drink, she hardly talks. She lays there sleeping with her mouth open babbling and we’re trying to get them to stop giving her the meds. The situation when they try to take her off the med. Of course she goes through severe sundowning because this medication causes more agitation more of everything. So it’s a vicious cycle. How do we get her off the meds to get back to normal if they think meds have to keep in her system to keep her calm down. But it’s the medication that’s causing the issue not my mom’s Alzheimer’s. If they get the medication out of her system, my mom will go back to the way she was when we brought her into the place has anybody else been through this I’m losing my mind. The not listen to us. They see her in this drug state and think this is the way she always is and they’re not listening to us saying we have to give her this but we’re telling them no you don’t. She was normal before this with some was not in state. The medication is causing this not my mom. We can’t get the to detox her has anybody had a time where they had to detox their dementia parent was

SDianeL

Welcome. So sorry about your Mom. Many dementia patients need medication for sleep, agitation and aggression. Many on this forum have loved ones on Seroquel. I would speak to the doctor and ask them to take her off all meds. If they comply you may need to hire someone to sit with her at night to make sure she’s not wandering if a family member can’t do so. Staff at facilities can’t watch a patient all the time. Facilities also must protect the caregivers. It’s difficult to know if it’s progression of the disease or the medications causing her to not sleep and have agitation. If your Mom does need to be on medications, the best doctor to prescribe them is a Geriatric Psychiatrist. You could ask for a referral to one.

towhee

Welcome to the discussion boards, but very sorry for the reason you are here. Yes, I had something similar happen with my LO. It stressed me out so much I had to be careful about driving, and it caused a lot of family anger. I did not have POA and could not get anyone to listen to me. It took months to resolve. I spent hours and hours researching medications and dementia. The problem is that we do not know how facilities work when we place our LOs, especially when it comes to medication. Rehab is different than long term care, in rehab they need the patient awake for physical therapy, so they are a little more careful with sleep meds. In long term skilled care, they might have two staff for 25 residents at night and one of them is doing paperwork most of the time, so they depend on residents being asleep and not needing care. Add to that, the occasional practice of not consulting family/Health Care Power of Attorney when prescribing meds because they deem the resident "competent". It can be very difficult to get doctors to discontinue or change medications after they have prescribed them, they might see it as you versus their judgement and the facilities need.

Doctors/facilities should never be using antihistamines for sleep for any elderly person, let alone one with dementia. There is a publication called the Beers Criteria of Potentially Inappropriate Medications for use in the elderly, put out by the American Geriatric Society. It is a guideline, not a hard and fast rulebook, but any doctor who had read it should not have prescribed an antihistamine for sleep, because that class of drug will cause increased confusion. There are better alternatives.

Seroquel is not the first thing usually prescribed for sleep either, although it is used when a couple other meds have been tried and have not worked. Usually, Seroquel is prescribed for hallucinations, and the side effects that you watch out for are movement problems and excessive sedation.

Every person is different in how they respond to medications, and medications react to one another. It can be very difficult to tell what is causing what, and the practice of prescribing new meds to handle what might be a side effect of a current med makes things even worse. Sometimes doctors who do not use certain medications often, or who are not familiar with a vulnerable population, might not even consider that a symptom might be a medication side effect. Your mom seems to be very sensitive and medically complex. I wonder if they are taking her kidney function into account when dosage is considered. It is not at all unusual for dosages to be cut in half when they are too sedating.

My LO had so many medication changes in the first two months of AL I literally wept. I managed to get them to agree to cut back and then they cut back too much too fast, got increased hallucinations and agitation, and put her back on everything. Was trying again to reduce meds when she fell and broke her hip. Was able to reduce and get off all meds while in rehab, but then was put on an antidepressant that basically made her a zombie. It took over a week to wean off that one. You do need to reduce and go off most of these meds slowly, too fast does not work. Although my LO got better, she never returned to baseline and she had lost a lot of her ability to walk even before the hip fracture.

We could never have gotten my LO off all the meds without having family and private care 24/7. There were side effects from going off the meds. After a month without meds, and the cessation of private care at night, they did add a medicine for sleep, this time with no ill effects.

You might also have some hospital delirium going on here. I agree with the previous poster about a geriatric psychiatrist.