Warning signs of Dementia

As I have said in earlier posts, my friend has been diagnosed with Vascular Dementia and is starting to show a decline in his ability to function. Dementia is a term that describes a variety of symptoms affecting a person's cognitive functioning, including their ability to think, remember, and reason. Dementia occurs when nerve cells in a person's brain stop working. Although it typically happens in older people, it is not an inevitable part of ageing. The brain's natural deterioration happens to everyone as they grow older, but it occurs more quickly in people with dementia. Dementia tends to get worse over time, and there are a few key early warning signs.

There are 10 typical early signs of dementia. Here are the first five. For a person to receive a diagnosis, they would usually experience two or more of these symptoms, and the symptoms would be severe enough to interfere with their daily life.

These early signs of dementia are:

1. Memory loss

A person developing dementia may have trouble remembering dates or events. Memory loss is a common symptom of dementia. A person with dementia may find it difficult to recall information they have recently learned, such as dates or events, or new information. They may find they rely on friends and family or other memory aids for keeping track of things.

Our workshop on Memory Loss is very popular, and I think it is because many of us relate memory loss to dementia. It is important to remember that while most people occasionally forget things more frequently as they age, they can usually recall them later if their memory loss is age-related and not due to dementia.

2. Difficulty planning or solving problems

A person with dementia may find it difficult to follow a plan, such as a recipe when cooking, or directions when driving. Problem-solving may also get more challenging, such as when adding up numbers to paying bills.

3. Difficulty doing familiar tasks

A person with dementia may find it difficult to complete tasks they regularly do, such as changing settings on a television, operating a computer, making a cup of tea, or getting to a familiar location. This difficulty with familiar tasks could happen at home or work.

4. Being confused about time or place

Dementia can make it hard to judge the passing of time. People may also forget where they are at any time. They may find it hard to understand events in the future or the past and may struggle with dates.

5. Challenges understanding visual information

Visual information can be challenging for a person with dementia. It can be hard to read, to judge distances, or work out the differences between colours. Someone who usually drives or cycles may start to find these activities challenging.

Focus on the positive.

All is well, you don't have to like or love everything or everyone. Injustices and villains are always around us. 

You know this to be true, just as you know that the good and the beauty always far exceed the bad and the ugly. Life is beautiful, enjoy and focus on the positive, not the negative.

Spring is here, think about your garden.

It is snowing today and it snowed at the end of the month in the lower mainland of BC, where I live. Although many regions of Canada are still buried under tons of snow, I suspect that gardeners around the country are starting to get busy. I know they are in BC. We are lucky here in my region, the snow will be gone in a few days and the ground will be warming up fast. Many of us are out in the gardening stores looking for inspiration to help us design our gardens and thinking about timelines to execute our plans, and some are about to start their seeds indoors.

Gardening is sometimes considered as a simple hobby, but think again! It is an amazing activity that can have positive effects on health and well-being. You may have heard people mentioning the therapeutic benefits of gardening, whether it is to maintain physical fitness, improve flexibility, coordination and strength, enhance physiological and psychological relaxation, improve self-esteem and depression symptoms, encourage creativity, and create social bonds (and even intergenerational relationships). Well, there is research evidence to support many of these claims!

What the research tells us

McMaster University did a systematic review that identified 22 studies that examined the benefits of gardening for older adults living in the community or in institutions. The majority of studies included in the review revealed that gardening is an activity appreciated by older adults that has positive effects on their physical health, cognitive abilities, nutrition, spirituality and social engagement. Gardening can even improve their level of autonomy and their quality of life.

The review also revealed that gardening allows seniors to reminisce childhood and family memories. It is therefore a comforting activity for older adults who can reconnect with their past, their culture and nature. Gardening activities conducted in a group can also promote social interaction and community support.

While the observed benefits of gardening are promising, they may not be the same for everyone. The review highlighted the need to further explore the effects of gardening on people with dementia and older adults with disabilities.

Getting started

Before taking out your shovels and rakes, take some time to plan your gardening activities:

·       Think about your health and safety: You may have a condition that prevents you from enjoying some gardening activities. You also need to assess your garden and the landscape to identify potential risks for falls, to protect yourself from the sun at all times, and to vary positions when working in the garden.

·       Adapt: The gardening activities, the tools, and the garden itself can be adapted to suit your needs and capacities (for example, installing raised garden beds or using lightweight and ergonomic tools may reduce the physical demand associated with gardening).

·       Socialize: Don’t go at it alone! Take advantage of community or local garden groups to connect with others, and share your passion and knowledge. By sharing gardening tasks with others, you may be able to find tasks that can better suit your needs and capacities (for example, digging, planting, watering, or harvesting fruits, vegetables and flowers). And nothing is better than enjoying the fruits of your labors with others!

Seniors of Canada Website

Every now and then there are very positive stories that catch your attention. This is one The Seniors of Canada website is a vehicle that gives seniors the ability to tell their stories. Here is what the website authors say on their “About us page”. This is a site worth more than one visit. On this website, you’ll see and read the photos and stories of seniors in the Hamilton Community including a Seniors of Canada initiative: Iconic Ageing. We hope you enjoy seeing the project and that it challenges your notions about ageism and the ageing process.

Hamilton umbrella, undergraduate students had the opportunity to take pictures and gather stories from iconic places and seniors in Hamilton. Through this initiative titled ‘Iconic Ageing’, a collaboration with Associate Dean in the Faculty of Social Sciences at McMaster University, Dr. James Gillett and his students went out and engaged, organize & documented the narratives from seniors at ‘iconic’ places in Hamilton, Ontario for his course on “Representations of Health and Illness Across the Life Course”.

As graduate students in the field of ageing, we often find ourselves so immersed in the theoretical and empirical content of our field, that the very subject of our interest—older people—becomes peripheral to our everyday work. Importantly, it has recently come to our attention that with the demographic shift, innovative initiatives to tackle stereotypes of ageing and ageism have yet to be made. In a ‘Humans of New York’ fashion we thought that by providing snapshots of the everyday lives of Hamilton’s older people, beyond the extremes and picturesque ideals promoted by the media, one will be able to view what seniors really look like and hear their stories, in a manner void of negative or positive connotations.

In May 2017, Members of the Gilbrea Student Group at McMaster University successfully received a Student Proposals for Intellectual Community & Engaged Scholarship (SPICES) grant with the goal to represent ageing as it truly is. A true passion project for our group, we hoped to conquer ageism, mitigate the stereotypes associated with ageing and shine a light on the everyday lives of seniors in the Hamilton community. We think we’ve done our goal justice.

We began the project with a focus group, where five seniors from the community gave us their input on our initial ideas, name and goals of the project. We got wonderful and encouraging feedback, and used that to move forward, ensuring that we maintained our goal of representing seniors the way they wanted to be represented.

We then met with seniors at a time and place of their choosing, and listened to their stories and took their photos. We met all of them somewhere that was an everyday part of their lives, at events, somewhere they enjoyed being, where they would want to be captured or doing something they loved. We asked questions about their lives and about what ageing means to them. We then distributed these images on our social media to reach as many and this photobook is the result of those meetings, stories, and photos.

Our final goal was to showcase our project in a photo-exhibit event in the heart of Hamilton, where the public was welcome to come and see the everyday lives and stories of people in their community.

Over the past year, the Seniors of Canada team has been putting together images and stories of some amazing seniors in the Hamilton area, and it’s finally time for everyone to see what we’ve been working so hard on. And now we’re here, presenting our pictures and stories in a book that sums up the spirit of our project; that ageing is a natural part of life and that being a senior doesn’t make your life or story any less valuable or interesting.