r/DementiaHelp

My mom is 84, lives at home with my sister. She adamantly refuses to admit that she has early stages of dementia which was diagnosed by neurologist a couple of years ago. The problem we are having with her is that she refuses basic hygiene. She will not bathe, wash her hair, brush her teeth, even wash her hands after going to the bathroom. She has trouble walking, but she refuses any walk aids because “those are for old people.” I handle all her financial affairs, but I live about an hour and a half away from her so I can’t really help with those basic things. My sister has been unsuccessful in getting her to do any of those things and she refuses any sort of caregiver. And the thought of going to an assisted living place is completely out of the question. She’s very difficult and I really don’t know at this point what I can do. Does anyone have any advice?

Did your relative consume a lot of canned food or canned drinks before developing Alzheimer’s?

I’m interested in hearing people’s personal experiences. Did your relative regularly eat a lot of tinned/canned food or drink frequently from aluminium cans throughout their life before developing Alzheimer’s disease or significant memory loss?

I’ve been researching the possible relationship between aluminium exposure and Alzheimer’s, and I’m curious whether anyone has noticed a pattern in their own family.

It's been a really difficult past few months for my dad. My mom and I are the main caregivers. I learned of his diagnosis just as I was starting my graduate program, so I've only been home more often for the summer.

He was always kind of mean, strict, conservative, harsh, yes, but always spoke poorly of people who hit their children. Its really hard for me to separate the memory of who he was and the reality of who he has the capacity to be now. It's so hard to care for parents who have traumatized even before the diagnoses.

These days it feels impossible. I just watched him get up to hit my mom with a remote mid-conversation, and I went to stop him. He hit me hard in the face. He tried again and again, I kept stopping his arm.

He started screaming that my mom slept with another man. This may have happened with a previous wife of his but we're not sure, definitely not my mom. The other night he said something worse about we tried to kill him, while I am mostly watching him and no such thing has ever happened. I don't know where this came from... but we are terrified he might say this to the wrong person. Are these hallucinations?

I am so confused and horrified and feel terribly alone in this process. I grieve him dearly, but I can't help but feel angry especially after he's hit me for the first time in my adult life.

I know I didn't react the way I should've. But I'm not even 24 yet and didn't already have great coping skills going into this. My next semester starts soon, and I want to be there for him, but now I am scared.

Any words, support, etc would be so appreciated.

I need help - My MIL with mild dementia tried to come over tonight to sleep over after being here half the day. I told my SIL who lives with her hell no.My MIL forgets where she lives and she has been sundowning badly. She has decided to bring my husband and son over to their place tomorrow and wants it to be a regular thing to keep my MIL regulated. My husband and son are being essentially kidnapped from me in the name of dementia. My 8 year old is essentially becoming my MIL's comfort item. I don't know what to do or how to protect him. I haven't slept in weeks and we live in a 2 bed/2 bath condo. The other tricky part is that my MIL is a city resident while we live in the suburbs. I just need help and a way to protect my 8 year old.

My dad 74M has been suffering from early stages of dementia where he is forgetting all proper nouns and speaking incoherently. I want this to not progress beyond this point as he was one of the most intelligent people I've ever met. It seems like he knows what he wants to say most of the time but can't seem to find the right words.

Hence I thought maybe it's about keeping the brain active and redeveloping the linkages in the brain, where a tutor coming in twice a week and teaching him like 5th grade English and Maths would help.

Have any of you tried this? Any advice on this would be great.

Both of my grandparents had cognitive declines starting their young 70s until they passed in their late 70s.

I am now 40 and while I don’t have any crazy stories, I know I’m not as sharp as I was 5-10 years ago.

Dr Amen and Brain MD have flooded my feeds. Would like to do some minor things before jumping in to a several thousand dollar scan (maybe scam).

Any advice for me on blood tests to do or anything to get a baseline?

My parents are late 60s and I’m noticing some subtle things with them. But no red flags and they aren’t very open to having medical discussions with me. My grandfathers were never around so know medical history about them.

Speak up.

Would like to know more about these sorts of things.

Thanks.

I’m a one of the caretakers of my grandparent who has vascular dementia. Due to having a completely separate job, we are needing to find a way to tag their vehicle in case they leave the house between having a support person in their home. Are there any devices you recommend? We originally used Life360 but they no longer will carry their phone, creating a whole new anxiety inducing situation 😅

My 93 year old mother is in the hospital right now with extreme lower GI bleeding. I mean she has already had to have 2 blood transfusions. When she has a bowel movement it is bright red . It's apparently active bleeding, but they aren't sure why. Her H and H stays low even after the transfusions. Everything was planned for a colonoscopy this afternoon. She was non compliant with drinking the prep, but they were going through with it anyway. Now, my mother gives dementia a new definition. I have never seen a 93 year old woman that's so non compliant and foul mouthed and will literally make you think twice about whether she really has dementia. Obviously, she does because her memory is exactly one minute long. Has been asking, for 2 days, how they know she has bleeding? what she's in the hospital for? what are they going to do? Can she leave now? Why she couldn't eat? over and over again, back to back. About 5pm they came and got her and she was explained to multiple times, what they were doing. They wheeled her down there and 5 minutes later, they called me and told me she was refusing and they couldn't do it. I told them she has dementia and they said she was able to say enough to refuse the procedure, so they are between a rock and a hard spot. Seems like they would know a dementia patient can be non compliant. That doesn't mean they understand the severity of their sickness. I told them if they couldn't find the source of her bleeding, and take care of it, I was afraid to bring her back home, because she almost passed out on me getting her to the hospital. They told me someone would have to come into the hospital to give her a test, in the morning, to prove her incompetent, before they could do it. The Dr in the ER asked her the year and she said 2028 and the month was July, but she knew she was at the hospital , the town and the president and he said she couldn't walk out, because that was what she was trying to do, because they were taking too long. Does anyone know what this test entails tomorrow, and will this be permanent so I don't have to go through this again. She has done this about a surgery on her knee once before, but the Dr was finally able to get her signature. Even before dementia set it, she has refused medical procedures recommended to her and has done it ever since. This is a lady who can't pay her bills, do her shopping, completely dress herself, comprehend and retain anything you tell her, handle making a phone call or appointment, take her medication without it being handed to her, but she has fooled many a Drs about her incompetence, because she is very feisty, rowdy and has a sharp tongue and can mask her incompetence very well. She says she doesn't have dementia, when it's mentioned, and when she can't remember something you just told her, she says she's senile. When Drs ask me things that she can't answer, like her medications etc. or when I tell them symptoms she exhibits. She yells at them to ask her and that she is the patient. Then they ask her and it's crickets, she has no idea.The minute they brought her back up she denied refusing the procedure and asked why they didn't do it. I told the nurse tomorrow don't say anything about sedation and talk about it, just do it, because that's what sets her off. No matter how many times I told her she was getting a colonoscopy, she kept saying they aren't putting her to sleep and cutting her and doing surgery. Does anyone else have a loved one who can mask their dementia for medical professionals? When she got back upstairs she asked me "why didn't they do her procedure. She had no remembrance of the refusal or outburst downstairs. And does anyone know about this test they are doing tomorrow.

Nearly a decade as an FNP doing health assessments means I’ve sat across from a lot of exhausted adult children trying to hold everything together.

The ones who struggle most aren’t the ones who love their parent least — they’re the ones with no system. Every appointment starts from scratch. Nobody can find the medication list. Siblings have different versions of events. The ER asks for medical history at 2am and nobody knows the answers.

The single most protective thing you can do right now — before the next crisis — is get organized. I mean specifically:

**•**	One place where all medications live with dosage and start dates  
**•**	A running log of behavioral changes with approximate dates  
**•**	Emergency contacts, insurance info, and advance directives in one place  
**•**	A calendar of appointments with notes from each visit

It sounds simple. Almost no family has it when they need it most.

If you’re in that season right now — managing a parent’s decline while working and raising kids — you are doing one of the hardest things a human being can do. Please don’t do it alone and don’t do it without a system.

Happy to answer questions from a clinical perspective.

Many of you in this community have shared powerful stories about noticing early changes — subtle shifts in mood, sleep, gait, confusion, or daily functioning — long before anyone took them seriously. Some of you are caregivers who saw signs years before diagnosis. Others are individuals who felt something was “off” but had no way to track or explain it.

I want to honor that. Early signs are real, and they’re often missed.

And for the clinicians here — PCPs, neurologists, neuropsychologists — many of you have said you wish you had clearer, earlier insight into these subtle changes so you could intervene sooner, triage better, and support families before crisis.

So here’s my question for today:

If you could have ONE tool to help you understand early changes in brain health — for yourself, a loved one, or your patients — what would you want it to show you?

My mum has had several strokes, relatively minor but it's affected her frontal lobe and she has a diagnosis of neuro vascular disease with cognitive impairment.

I understand that this is a progressive disease and she is very likely to develop vascular dementia.

I also understand that although the MRI scans show the physical picture this doesn't tell you everything, how people are doing practically is an essential part of the process of diagnosing. So there's the clinical assessment.

Just in the last couple of months my mum has gotten significantly worse in her mental health. She does have a history of mental ill health including psychiatric hospitalisation. So this could just be a combination of the cognitive impairment and a psychiatric illness.

I'm wondering if it would make sense for her to have another assessment re dementia.

What troubles me is that she has, for as long as I can remember, been terrified of getting dementia. She was the sister in charge of a nursing home for over a decade and witnessed people suffering terribly with it. She's frequently said she'd rather be dead than live with dementia. I worry about the psychological impact on her if she did get this diagnosis.

Afaik with Alzheimer's it's possible to take medication which slows the progress and can address some of the symptoms. But with vascular dementia there's nothing.
(There's blood thinners as a preventative of any further strokes, she is already taking one)

What I'm wondering is, are there benefits to being diagnosed?

We are in England, UK in case that's relevant.

I am 22f and I feel like my memory is declining. I keep forgetting how to spell easy words, forget what they mean, and forget how to pronounce them.
I forgot how to pronounce “initially” and it is just embarrassing because I sound dumb.
I was talking with my mom, and she used the word “sensible” I was like what do you mean, what does that mean?
Why is this happening?? I haven’t drank alcohol in a month, I am prescribed medication but it seems like this is a new thing and I’ve been on medication for a long time.
I forget small things and misplace stuff. For example if I cough, 10 mins later I don’t remember doing that.
Is this something that I should be worried about?
When looking at this long term, I don’t remember my child hood and I don’t even remember what buildings my highschool had or where they are. I graduated in 2022.

We got staff that we had come to trust to supervise my grandmother while we were away. Apparently, my grandmother started to decline more while they were together. She reportedly became aggressive, and then fell out of bed and fractured two of her ribs. She also broke out in a fever, and became very sick and weak.

My mother and my uncle both came to the conclusion that because of this, she is no longer safe to live in her own house, and she would very likely not do well with staff in her home. We’re moving her into residential care. It’s her worst fear, or at least it was before she lost herself, she threatened to starve herself to death if we put her in a home. I don’t think she even knows where she is anymore. She hasn’t known for a while.

It doesn’t help that the staff apparently asked to invite in her mother and her aunt, which my uncle
approved of, but with these two strangers, went through my grandmother‘s things and cleaned stuff out (my grandmother, admittedly, has become a hoarder, but the woman kept insisting the house wasn’t safe. I protest against this, because we kept her out of the hospital for a whole eight months before she got there. She was left alone with her for three days, and she went to the hospital? And you’re telling us that the state we kept the house in wasn’t safe…)

She’s now borderline catatonic. She speaks in whispers, she constantly tries to escape her room, tries to take off her clothes. I’ve apologized to the hospital staff, I’ll do the same to the nursing home staff. I know it’s their job, but it would be her apologizing if she was still in her right mind.

Yet strangely, she remembers my mother‘s name again, which she hasn’t remembered much in the eight months that we were taking care of her in the house.
She also has asked my mother several times “are the little ones here?” She means me and my brother, her grandchildren. Before you ask, don’t worry, I’m going to visit her this weekend. My brother might not go, just because we don’t want him to have to see her without clothes on.

I apologize if it seems like I’m asking for sympathy, or if I seem like want to be coddled. I’m an adult, but the fact that she still sees me as her “little one” is breaking me.

I know many of you are dealing with far worse.
It’s just been so awful to see the woman I love turned into an empty shell over the course of less than a year. I hardly even recognize her anymore. It hurts to see her. It hurts to know I can’t help her, I can’t save her from this. It hurts to know her once amazing mind is falling apart. I sometimes wonder if we shouldn’t have taken our trip (it was a week, she was supervised the entire time), if she’d be any better if we had never left. But I also was about to collapse under the stress.

I also apologize if this seems incredibly morbid/discouraging…I’m a person of faith, and I believe there is a peaceful and happy afterlife waiting for her… I keep praying that she would be taken away painlessly soon. I don’t want her to die, I still love her endlessly, but she would not want to live like this, and it’s a pain unlike any other to see her withering and in constant misery. I feel evil for thinking in such a way.

All of us are thinking that way, and we all feel horrible about it. We all feel horrible for being relieved that we no longer have to take care of her. But there’s also relief that she is somewhere where she’ll be safe, and that she can maybe be made comfortable over time. We are all so burnt out.

We gave it our everything, my whole family did, and we still lost her.

My mother 79, diagnosed with late onset Alzheimer’s and possibly vascular dementia. She’s still mostly here but there are definite changes visible especially last 6 months.

She’s seeing all the doctors and has plenty of apptmts and they send her all over for tests but I feel like mostly it’s a just a way to keep everyone busy.

What do I really need to start getting done? Financially, emotionally?

My father is still around but he’s also 84.

My mom has very clear issues with her memory. She has for several years and it's declining faster now. She gets very upset (angry, stubborn, shuts down) when this is brought up. I've been trying to get her diagnosed for years so that my dad can get help and support taking care of her, and so that things are in place when we inevitably have to move her into care. I'm in Ontario, Canada. I have PoA and am approved to speak to her doctor on her behalf.

Late last year mom had a MOCA test and her GP referred her to a Geriatric Doctor but somehow things stalled there and the follow up never happened. I spoke with her GP office this week and they said another MOCA test is needed and they'll refer her again.

The problem is she is going to fight tooth and nail over going in for another memory test. How can I approach this? I can't rely on my dad to push this forward, he's afraid of her wrath. I will make it happen but am looking for advice.

Thanks!