The Difference Between Alzheimers Disease and Dementia

This is the Truth, Lies and Alzheimer's Show. I'm Ken Poglia, but more importantly, I'm here to bring you your host, Alzheimer's and dementia expert, best-selling author, and world-renowned public speaker, Lisa Skinner. Since this is the debut episode, we're going to start at the beginning. And Lisa Skinner is going to tell a very personal story about her first experience with brain disease. And then she's going to go over some of the fundamentals of brain disease, some of the fundamental building blocks of what caregivers need to learn to optimize their time with their loved ones. But first, we want to tell you that Passionate World Talk Radio is a wholly owned subsidiary of Global Media Network, LLC. Our motto is: Educate, Enlighten, and Entertain. And we want you to know that Global Media Network, LLC and Passionate World Talk Radio have made this program possible. And with that, I am very pleased to turn it over to our host, Lisa Skinner.

Well, thanks, Ken, and hello to all of you who have tuned in to listen to this episode of our show, Truth, Lies Alzheimer's. Again, I'm Lisa Skinner, your host, and I'd like to shout out a very warm welcome to everyone who has joined us today. You know, the purpose of this show is to talk about every aspect of Alzheimer's disease, and that's going to include the good, the bad, and the ugly. Our goal here is to get to the truth, dispel the lies and myths, and unveil the secret faces of Alzheimer's disease and related dementia in order to understand what it's truly like to live with a brain disease. My goal is to zoom outside the paradigm of it exclusively being a memory loss condition in order to shift people's understanding of just how dramatically this disease impacts the lives of those who have it, as well as their caregivers and family members. Oh, and for that matter, anybody who's involved in the life of a person living with dementia. My story started almost 50 years ago when my grandmother began displaying some very unusual behaviors. She only lived a couple miles from where my family lived, and so we visited her often. I grew up with her, and I would say I had a pretty close relationship with my grandma, and When I was a teenager, I remember going over to her house, sitting down with her to have a normal conversation, and she starts telling me these unbelievable stories that I had never heard before. She was explaining to me that these birds were living in her mattress. And that they would come out at night and peck at her face. And then she started telling me that she would see rats running along her walls, and she just didn't know how to get rid of them or how to keep them from, from just ruining her home. And then She proceeded to tell me about the men, and she called them the men, who tried to break into her house with the intention of harming her and stealing her belongings. She was especially worried about her jewelry. I'm listening to these stories and they sounded so far-fetched to me, and I'm thinking in my head, how could 'Can any of this be true? Birds living in a mattress and just coming out and pecking at her face at night?' But I adored my grandma. I had never, ever known her to lie to me, to make things up, to embellish stories. And so I wanted desperately to believe what she was telling me. I even went to this extent one day of leading her into her bedroom and say, "Come on, Grandma, come with me. Show me where these birds are living." I pushed the mattress up and looked underneath, and there was no hole. There was no evidence of birds or feathers or anything. And I said, "Show me where these birds are. Maybe we can do something about it." And she looks me straight in the eye and she says, "Oh, Lisa, they're there. They're just very, very clever." So, she had a brilliant response for not being able to explain to me where these birds were. Unfortunately, she was also calling the police regularly, 3, 4, 5 times a day sometimes. And of course, they initially took her seriously and sent a patrol officer to the house to check out her claims. Of course, they didn't find any evidence of any rats or burglars or men that wanted to harm her, or birds for that matter.

And—

but the phone calls persisted day in and day out. So finally, the police chief tracked my mother down, came over to our house, and said to my mother, "Ma'am, you really need to do something about your mother. She is a nut, and we cannot keep taking these phone calls. We don't have the resources or the time to deal with all these fantasies that she's having." And I was standing right there And when she called— when he called my grandmother a nut, I was incensed. I couldn't believe that this police officer had such little empathy for what was going on with my grandmother. He didn't even take into consideration that there might be something wrong with her, might be a disease or an illness. He just jumped to the conclusion that she was a nutcase. And told my mother to do something with her. That, that statement still haunts me today. So, I became a behavior specialist and I have spent nearly 30 years working in the elder care industry counseling families on how to best live with this disease so they can focus on what really matters, which is spending quality time with their loved ones. I've also authored several books. I've written a training program on the subject, and believe it or not, I have watched 8 of my own family members fall prey to one of these brain diseases that causes dementia. I'm also a certified dementia care trainer with the Alzheimer's Association. You know, there are so many aspects aspects of living with dementia that are unexpected and can surface out of nowhere at any time. I call these the hidden or secret faces of dementia. And as many of you know, they show up unannounced and are completely unpredictable. That's why it's so important to be prepared for anything that shows up on this journey. Knowledge is power, and I'm here to arm you with that knowledge so you too will have the power to negotiate the many challenges you will face having a loved one or caring for someone with dementia. So, in the fashion as Fraulein Maria in The Sound of Music, when she wanted to teach the Von Trapp children how to sing, Y'all remember what she told them? Let's start at the very beginning is what she said. It's a very good place to start. And that's exactly what I'm going to do with you. I'm going to start at the very beginning with explaining what the difference is between Alzheimer's disease and dementia. So, many people have the misconception that Alzheimer's disease and dementia are either the same disease and the terms are interchangeable or they're two separate diseases. Neither one is true. So let's start with Alzheimer's disease. Alzheimer's disease is the actual disease. It is a brain disease that kills the cells, damages and kills the neurons in our brain and causes many cognitive changes in the various parts of the brain as it continues to do its damage over the progression of the disease. Now, when we use the term dementia, it's really used as an umbrella term to describe the signs and the symptoms that are caused by Alzheimer's disease. As a matter of fact, there are actually over 100 brain diseases that cause dementia. So, it's much easier to just reference the term dementia when you're talking about the symptoms than to name all of them out, which is very difficult to do anyway because there's over 100 symptoms related to brain diseases. So, think of it this way. We've all had a cold.

We've all—

most of us have had the flu. Some of us have had COVID. And when we go to our doctor, what do we do when we get there? We describe to him the way we are feeling, the symptoms that we are experiencing. We might tell them we have a fever. We might tell them that our body aches from head to toe. We might have chills. We might have a splitting headache. But what we are describing are the symptoms that we are experiencing. And then we're hoping through a process of elimination or testing that our doctor will be able to say, "Oh, you've got the flu," or, "You have a common cold." This is the exact association that I'm trying to make between dementia and Alzheimer's disease or one of the other brain diseases that causes dementia. So, when we're using the term dementia, we're really referring to the symptoms like the hallucinations, the agitation, the delusions, the depression. These are all signs and symptoms of what the brain disease causes as a result of the damage it's doing to our brains. Other aspects of living with Alzheimer's disease that people are not even aware exist or are not aware that they are a very common part of the disease, for example, are wandering, delusions, false beliefs, hallucinations, repetition, not recognizing a loved one, suspiciousness, and paranoia. These are just some of the common behaviors associated with dementia. These symptoms that I just described to you or named off to you These are what fall into the dementia bucket. And living with dementia is unlike anything you can imagine. It's like falling into a rabbit hole and entering a world unlike anything you've ever known and one that becomes completely unfamiliar. That said, it's equally important to not only understand what will occur on a day-to-day basis but why they occur. What is happening to the person's changing brain as they progress through the various stages of Alzheimer's disease? Once you understand that, then you can hopefully be prepared for what might challenge you day in and day out. And that really is the key. It's being prepared and not being caught off guard. So, we're going to talk about all of this, because it really does take very specialized knowledge and specialized training to know how to effectively respond to situations that arise with a damaged brain, so as to avoid any situation from escalating into an extreme one. We call these catastrophic reactions. And unfortunately, no amount of reasoning can talk the person experiencing many of these symptoms out of their beliefs. So, we must rely on alternative strategies to manage them. According to the Alzheimer's Association, approximately 1 out of 3 Alzheimer's disease sufferers will develop paranoia or suspiciousness, and 90% will display behavioral impulses. The real work of our brain goes on in individual cells called neurons. An adult brain contains about 100 billion of these neurons with branches that connect at more than 100 trillion points in our brain. These signals, which are traveling from neuron to neuron, form the basis of memory, thoughts, and feelings. These neurons are the cells that are destroyed by Alzheimer's disease. And here are some of the cognitive losses that you can expect to see in people with Alzheimer's disease. With their language, they may display several forms of language impairment known as aphasia, such as difficulty finding or remembering words and/or difficulty with rules of syntax and grammar However, the physical ability to speak can remain intact. Their judgment is compromised. Reasoning skills often become impaired, resulting in poor judgment, such as not thinking about looking for oncoming cars when crossing a street. Somebody living with dementia might just step right off a curb and not even remember to look both ways to see if there's oncoming cars. Their perception is compromised. Their eyesight itself may be fine, but the brain's ability to accurately interpret what one is seeing may be impaired and distorted, which can ultimately diminish one's ability to recognize an otherwise familiar object or place, as well as impair the ability to use common objects like a simple kitchen appliance that they may have been operating for years, for decades, like a coffee maker. Their concentration is impaired, which is the ability to pay attention or concentrate may also be compromised and inhibit a person with dementia from paying attention to what they're supposed to be doing, like eating a meal. They lose their ability to task sequence. Pretty much everything we do on a day-to-day basis is based on learning the sequencing of tasks or the series of steps in a certain order that it takes to complete a task. People with dementia inherently lose the ability to follow the sequence of tasks. For example, the steps it takes to put your clothes on in the morning. Or to brush your teeth, resulting in total confusion as to how to perform these basic tasks of living. The early signs of dementia may be very subtle and hard to distinguish between the process of normal aging forgetfulness and the more serious beginnings of a brain disease, such as problems with memory, especially with the recall of recent events, confusion, personality changes, apathy and withdrawal, and the loss of ability to do everyday tasks. Because people with brain disease suffer from impaired reasoning, they also may easily interpret others' intentions and have difficulty understanding what is being communicated to them. Their ability to separate fact from fiction becomes impaired. And in a person living with dementia, the ability to perceive things the same way you and I do diminish and will affect that person's judgment both visually and conceptually. Their level of confusion increases over time because they are losing that ability to make sense of what their senses take in. And so consequently, this can produce many adverse reactions such as fright and/or combative behavior. Remember, the brain is at the center of our thought processes and is central to our lives. It takes in information from our daily experiences and enables us to make sense of our world. Our memories truly are the threads that sew our lives together in a sequence and in continuity. But when our memories begin to fail, the tie to our lives unravel, resulting in nearly a complete loss of oneself. And these are just some of the changes that are occurring in the brains of those who live with Alzheimer's disease and related dementia.— and what we will be taking a deep dive into on each episode of Truth, Lies Alzheimer's. So, as you can see, this is a much more complex and complicated disease than just short-term memory loss and confusion. It goes so much deeper than that, and this is what I'm going to to spend our time together explaining to you and also educating you on how to learn the new language of talking to somebody who lives with dementia. But before I close, Ken has a couple of announcements to make.

Thank you for listening to The Truth Lies in Alzheimer's Show. With your host, Lisa Skinner. Lisa, I deeply appreciate listening to your stories. And, you know, even though we've been working together for years, I always appreciate how you go over the fundamentals and the basic building blocks because I always get something out of them. And I don't think you can ever learn and practice the fundamentals too much. So I really appreciate that. This program can be found on our website at passionateworldtalkradio.com under the shows tab and on YouTube, /passionateworldtalkradio. You can find us on social media including on Facebook at Lisa Skinner Author, and you can always go to our website truthliesalzheimers.com If you're interested in our book, you can find it on our website, truthliesaltimers.com. You can also find it at all major booksellers. And let me give a plug to our audiobook. If you like listening to audiobooks, if you like listening to books while you walk, run, drive, I think Lisa Skinner Skinner is especially proud of what we've produced with our audiobook, and I would recommend that anybody check that out. And with that, Lisa, take us home.

Well, thanks so much, Ken, for all your wonderful information. And I also want to thank our listeners for being here with us today. You know, we have so much to cover in the upcoming episodes and the information that will hopefully be helpful and valuable to you throughout your journey. Remember, dementia awareness is every day, and kindness is the ability to speak with love, listen with compassion, and act with patience—all very necessary attributes to have to outlast Alzheimer's disease. One last note: this show is about you and how my expertise and experience and strategies will help you and your loved ones have an easier time while struggling through this disease. Therefore, I'd love it if you would send me your comments and suggestions for what topics you'd like me to cover on my weekly show. You can send them to my email, which is dementiawhisperer1@gmail.com. Thanks again for being here. Thanks again for listening. I look forward to receiving your thoughts and ideas, and in the meantime, take care of you. And if you're listening to this on YouTube, or if you got here through our social media page, please leave your comments or questions, and we will do our very best to address them. Talk to you next week. Take care.