seroquel usage for 93 year old with dementia for the past 11 years.

Like others have said, she needs to be evaluated by a geriatric psychiatrist for medication management. Mine sees a geriatric nurse practitioner. She has been a godsend. 50 mg is a low dose. I recently upped DH dose to 75 mg. You could easily double or triple that but make an appointment with a geriatric psychiatrist and include a video if you can. The nurse told me she sees patients that are on 300-400 mg day. Obviously you wouldn’t want to start with that.

That's a very interesting paper. It in no way reflects my personal experience with the medication at all. Through no fault of our own, we took part in a double-blind study.

My dad was initially started on Seroquel when he was given a working diagnosis of Alzheimer's and referred to a doctor at the memory center. He'd been agitated to the point of aggression before the hospitalization, and I feared for my mom once he was released from rehab and realized we'd moved them near me. They'd been spending the year split between FL and MD and needed to move to PA after mom almost died in dad's care. The doc started him on 25mg at dinnertime to help with sundowning and sleep. It didn't extinguish the behavior entirely, but it dialed it way back to manageable. He adjusted to rehab and was there for 7 weeks.

Because he didn't have a local physician yet, the SNF's doctor sent his current prescriptions to the local pharmacy giving us time to establish care with a new PCP. Within a week, dad became angry and aggressive in the evenings— threatening my mom and keeping her up all night with angry threats. After the third call in as many nights to come calm things down, I double-checked with mom that he'd been taking his meds. She said he was, so I went into the cabinet to check and discovered— much to my horror— that the national chain pharmacy had given dad refills from some random dude with the same name and DOB. There was a lot of overlap on the meds— same BP and SSRI meds and slightly different doses of metformin and statin but no Seroquel. Without it, a mere 25mg, he was a mess.

FTR, dad's geripsych suspected that he came to dementia with bi-polar disorder based on his personal and family history. Atypical antipsychotics, like Seroquel, are the go-to meds for this condition albeit at higher doses typically than those used for dementia; those with schizophrenia might also be prescribed these meds at even higher doses. On the other hand, I know of children with ASD who did well on a halved 25mg of the same.

HB