When someone you love is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, it can feel like your world is crumbling around you. The sudden onslaught of fear, uncertainty, and stress can be overwhelming. Most families want to keep their loved one close and cared for as long as possible, and often take on the caregiving role themselves. Your role as a caregiver for a loved one with Alzheimer’s will be an evolving journey. It won’t always be easy, but with the right tools and systems in place, it can be significantly less daunting.
Caregivers of Alzheimer’s patients often find the responsibility rewarding but challenging. Individuals often aid patients with tasks ranging from personal hygiene to providing emotional support. It’s an important role, but you should always remember that you don’t have to do it alone.
Understanding the Needs of a Person With Alzheimer’s
Alzheimer’s is a neurodegenerative disease that impacts the daily lives of 55 million people worldwide. Patients of this illness can suffer initial mild memory loss, escalating to an inability to converse with or respond to others or perform their basic daily activities. It’s a complex, debilitating disease that comes with a host of challenges for patients and caregivers alike.
Managing the challenges of Alzheimer’s caregiving becomes easier when caregivers fully comprehend what to expect. Individuals with this illness will experience effects on their cognition, behavior, personality, and physical abilities.
A Decline in Cognitive Abilities
In the initial stages, Alzheimer’s invades one part of the brain and later expands to other areas, replacing healthy nerve cells and connections with diseased plaques and tangles. This mechanism drives the emergence of symptoms.
The ability to reason, learn and adapt, form and recall memories, and use language often worsens with time. Understanding how the disease progresses biologically can help caregivers develop effective Alzheimer’s caregiving strategies.
Changes in Behavior and Personality
Your loved one can start to display frustration, worry, hostility, or disinterest during normal daily activities. They may also sleep more or even wander away from home.
Changes in mood or stress levels, health, or physical capability can result in an Alzheimer’s patient behaving differently. The behavior and personality changes associated with Alzheimer’s often occur in stages. They can encompass many emotions and types of conduct, and individuals should recognize them when supporting a loved one with Alzheimer’s disease.
Physical Limitations
Knowing the physical changes that may occur as the disease escalates is one of the Alzheimer’s caregiving tips that often gets overlooked. Some patients may experience physical symptoms before the mental and behavioral ones. Individuals with Alzheimer’s might have muscle weakness or stiffness, shuffle their feet while walking, lack balance, and more.
Preparing for the Caregiver Role
Preparation is key! When caring for your loved one with Alzheimer’s at home, education and living space modification can aid success.
Educating Yourself About Alzheimer’s and Available Resources
Arming caregivers with knowledge is essential. Knowing how to react starts with foundational learning about the disease. The following resources can aid you in obtaining a better understanding:
Mayo Clinic – Alzheimer’s stages: How the disease progresses
HelpGuide
Modifying the Home Environment to Accommodate the Needs of the Person With Alzheimer’s
Preserving the safety of your loved one is of overriding concern, and it starts with evaluating the home to ensure it meets the unique demands of the patient. Before deciding on possible updates, an assessment must be made to review the potential dangers of the home environment.
When home renovation is necessary, caregivers must conduct research, utilizing sources like home modifications for the elderly and basic home renovations, sorted by room type. Those supporting a loved one with Alzheimer’s disease can seek monetary assistance in the form of financial aid for home renovations.
Providing Daily Care
Alzheimer’s patients often cannot navigate life without help. As such, the best Alzheimer’s caregiving tips include robust planning to handle necessities, disease management, and administration of finances and legal matters.
Assisting With Basic Daily Activities
A daily care plan can make life easier for both patients and caregivers. Effective Alzheimer’s caregiving strategies consider your loved one’s likes and dislikes, your needs, and a degree of flexibility when devising an everyday care plan.
The plan should ensure both parties’ safety, freedom of choice, involvement, and dignity. By keeping it simple and setting realistic schedules, everybody wins.
Managing Medications and Scheduling Medical Appointments
When caring for your loved one with Alzheimer’s, learning medication basics is a necessary step. Doses, interactions, medication schedules, and potential side effects are crucial when caring for someone with Alzheimer’s. You should consult with healthcare providers to ascertain the appropriate frequency of appointments and follow-ups. Have your loved one’s doctor walk you through their treatment plan and help create the appropriate medication and appointment schedule.
Handling Financial and Legal Affairs
Knowing when to take control of financial and legal affairs can be tricky. However, all caregivers should know the signs of potential money problems, intervene early, and guard against abuse and fraud.
Declining health often triggers the need to update financial and legal documentation. Powers of attorney, wills, account signatories, and advance directives must be kept current as their Alzheimer’s disease progresses. It’s best to handle this early and preventatively, before the Alzheimer’s begins to progress aggressively. This will also allow your loved one to help and feel as though they still have control over their life.
Coping With the Challenges of Caregiving
Implementing strategies to cope with challenges is among the best Alzheimer’s caregiving tips we can give. Caregivers cannot provide the best care if they do not address their physical, emotional, and mental well-being.
One-Fourth of Alzheimer’s caregivers are considered “sandwich generation” caregivers — meaning they care for a parent with Alzheimer’s and at least one child under the age of 18.
We know how much you sacrifice when caring for your family. It’s critical to take care of yourself during this process as well. Your well-being is just as important.
Dealing With Difficult Behaviors and Emotions
Your loved one can exhibit conduct and feelings that may overload you. The best way to support them is to let them express their emotions, but continue to encourage them. You can gently provide reminders and suggest using reminder tools (alarms, task lists, notes) to prevent or limit their frustrations.
Try to refrain from arguments, keep emotions in check, and prioritize the patient’s involvement to diffuse challenging situations. If emotions run high, consider seeking out others who will listen and provide comfort.
Seeking Support
Ask for help from friends, family, and professional organizations when you need it. You don’t have to do it all alone. Reaching out for help will only benefit you and your loved one.
As a patient’s disease progresses, they may need more care. Thus, it’s important to develop resilient support networks and know where to access available resources. Consider the following Alzheimer’s caregiving tips:
Find a support system for yourself
Connect with other caregivers who understand your struggles
Continue to educate yourself about Alzheimer’s and treatment developments
Stay in close communication with physicians
Considering Respite Care Options to Prevent Caregiver Burnout
Caregivers need breaks when supporting a loved one with Alzheimer’s disease. Availing oneself of respite care can curtail the potential stress-induced exhaustion that may result from caring for an Alzheimer’s patient at home.
Additionally, respite care gives patients opportunities for meaningful interactions with others and valuable experiences outside the norm. Caregivers should evaluate which type of respite care, i.e., in-home services, adult day center, or a long-term care community, would best align with their caregiving plan.
Understanding the Importance of Self-Care and Maintaining a Healthy Balance
No list of Alzheimer’s caregiving tips would be complete without discussing caregiver health. Those providing care should learn to control stress and any recognized depression in a healthy manner when managing the challenges of Alzheimer’s caregiving.
30% of caregivers experience depression, high levels of anxiety, and a sense of burden.
60% report an overwhelming sense of emotional stress.
You cannot take care of others unless you take care of yourself. Everyone needs a break — humans cannot survive without rest!
Prioritize your mental health and take breaks when your stress levels start to rise. Ask for help from your support system. Spend time doing something you love, whether that’s reading, gardening, meditating, or watching a comfort movie. Decompressing will allow you to take better care of your loved one and maintain a healthy balance.
Maintaining your physical well-being is also essential. Some tips include seeing your physician as necessary, staying active, and eating a nutritious diet.
Finding these moments of balance can also include your loved one with Alzheimer’s. Explore new ways to connect with your loved one — whether that’s watching a movie together, listening to their favorite music, going on short nature walks, or anything else that brings you peace. Spending time doing calming activities together can help you bond and destress simultaneously.
How Kurve Can Help
Kurve Therapeutics is acutely aware of the devastating impact Alzheimer’s can have — both on the patient and their family. Our next-gen medtech and specialty drug formulations are designed to target these complex, debilitating diseases with the goal of giving patients and caregivers their lives back.
In 22 nose-to-brain clinical trials, our patented technology has been studied in hundreds of cognitively impaired patients. Kurve has successfully and significantly met its primary endpoint — cognitive performance — in five double-blind, placebo-controlled Phase II studies.
We do this because we can and because we have to. There are millions of people suffering from this disease without efficient treatment. Not only has our technology shown significant clinical efficacy, this is a personal fight for us. Our founder has watched loved ones lose their fight with Alzheimer’s disease and knows first-hand how this disease impacts patients and their families.
It’s time to fight back against Alzheimer’s disease.
What is Kurve’s Groundbreaking CPD® Technology?
Through the development of our patented Controlled Particle Dispersion® technology, Kurve Therapeutics is able to deliver up to 30x more disease-modifying medication than infusions directly to the brain with significant clinical success in several Phase II studies.
The blood-brain barrier (BBB) has historically been a hurdle in the success of treatments for neurodegenerative diseases, but our patented nose-to-brain technology has been shown to bypass the BBB with targeted precision and vast success in clinical trials. While traditional treatment options continually prove ineffective at stopping neurodegenerative disease progression and often lead to toxicity or continued decline, Kurve offers a new, disease-modifying approach.
Our advanced device is non-invasive, easy to use, painless, and reduces systemic side effects. The CPD® device has been used in human clinical trials around the world through Phase I, II, and IIB clinical studies.
We are currently ready for Phase III clinical trials for Alzheimer’s disease.
What Can You Do to Further Kurve’s Impact?
There is hope for Alzheimer’s disease. Kurve can help, but we can’t do it alone. Investments from the general public can help us fulfill our goal of delivering treatments to millions of patients and those tasked with managing the challenges of Alzheimer’s caregiving.
An investment in Kurve is an investment in the future of Alzheimer’s — one that is not as devastating.
Caregivers Are Heroes
Caregiving for a person with Alzheimer’s can be challenging, but it can also be a rewarding experience. It can change your perspective on life and teach younger family members what it means to care for others. Perhaps most importantly, it is the purest expression of love for another. By educating yourself and seeking support, you can effectively prepare for and carry out the caregiver role.
Kurve Therapeutics wants to provide long-awaited hope and relief for caregivers and those dealing with the devastating effects of neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s. You can be a part of that mission. Be a part of turning the tide on cognitive aging by investing in Kurve’s Regulation A offering and making a life-changing impact for millions.
Click here to download the infographic on Preparing to Care for a Loved One with Alzheimer’s.