Local programs aim to help with Alzheimer's

By Jonathan Starkey
Staff Reporter

According to the Alzheimer’s Association — a national organization that raises money and awareness for the disease — 59 percent of people diagnosed with the disease will eventually wander off.

Jamie Magee, the Georgetown branch office coordinator for the organization, knows that firsthand. Her father, an Alzheimer’s victim, once left his Alabama home without anyone’s knowledge, about 2 a.m. Without any shoes, he trekked through thick woods, over two barbed-wire fences and through a cow pasture to a stranger’s home before being found and returned home.

Magee said that her father was looking for his childhood home, which actually stood in the cow pasture that he passed. But it had been destroyed decades earlier. Unfortunately, because of the dementia caused by the Alzheimer’s, he did not remember that he didn’t live there anymore, let alone that the house was not still standing. This type of activity is common for patients of the disease, Magee said.

When an Alzheimer’s victim does wander, early discovery is necessary for the patient’s health. Magee said that if they are not found within 24 hours of becoming lost, 46 percent of the patients are eventually found severely injured or even dead.

That is specifically the reason that the national organization started its Safe Return program, which Magee and Cynthia Tunney, a local association volunteer, promoted on Tuesday at the Ocean View Police Department.

The Safe Return program reaches out to Alzheimer’s patients, gathers basic information such as their names and addresses, and puts them into a national registry. They also give the patients registration cards and bracelets so they can be identified if they wander off. Usually, the person with Alzheimer’s is confused and sometimes angry when found, and may not remember their names or addresses. With the identification, emergency personnel can tell who they are and return them home.

Magee and Tunney said that the program, as well as other educational programs for civilians, caregivers and emergency workers, is needed in the Delaware coastal area, which has an increasingly large elderly population.

“They’re people who are retired and don’t have family to help them,” Magee said. “We want to train all emergency personnel. They may be the first people to come in contact with them (when the patient is lost).”

Programs such as the Safe Return are still needed because there is no cure for Alzheimer’s, which is a fatal disease. Medications currently on the market can only slow down the disease, which kills brain cells, working first on short-term memory.

The physical brain disease — which is commonly misidentified as a mental disease — has unknown causes but occurs when plaque becomes lodged in between brain cells.

“It cuts off the communication” between those brain cells, Magee said. “If they can’t communicate, they die. It kills one brain cell at a time.”

Alzheimer’s attacks more recent memories and then works backwards, causing some patients to think they are living in the past, as it did to Magee’s father when he went looking for his childhood home.

Patients then start losing the ability to perform basic everyday functions. Most Alzheimer’s patients die of pneumonia when they forget how to swallow and can no longer eat. But if side-effects of the disease don’t kill the Alzheimer’s patient, some have actually deteriorated so far that they lose all of their senses and die in the fetal position with the mind frame of a baby. There are things people can do, however, to help prevent, or prolong life with, the disease.

“It’s hard to be positive about something that has a bad outcome,” Tunney said. “But there’s always hope.”

Learning something new every day is a technique Tunney recommends people use in case they ever develop Alzheimer’s. Even if someone develops the disease, they can afford to lose some brain cells if they have more brain cells to work with in the first place, she said.

Learning something new can be as simple as brushing their teeth with their left hand or something as complex as learning to play piano. Every little bit helps, Tunney said, noting that she wished she had known more about the disease when her mother started showing symptoms before being diagnosed.

Tunney said her experience with her mother was one of the reasons she became involved. Now, with the association, she is making sure that more caregivers, emergency personnel and other people are educated about the physical disease. She has even started the only Alzheimer’s support group in the Ocean View area. And the town’s police department — by receiving training for each officer and hosting educational sessions such as Tuesday’s — has been a huge help to her, and the Association’s, mission.

One of the most important things to know and remember about patients — which whom the officers in Ocean View are now quite familiar — is that every patient reacts to the disease in a different way, she said.

Some patients wander off, for instance, but some will not. And Tunney said that while her mother remembered the people closest to her even while forgetting everyday life functions, Magee’s father sometimes didn’t remember his own wife.

His reaction to the disease was one of the reasons that he did eventually wander off through the woods and into the cow pasture where his home once stood, looking for the people he did remember, Magee said. She added that if people are more educated on the disease, they can understand each individual patient’s specific symptoms.

“My father would say ‘honey, I don’t know who you are, but I have family who is looking for me,” Magee said. “My mother is looking for me.”