A dementia carer on her mother’s condition and the importance of physical and mental exercise to help prevent and reduce its effects
- Dementia is a cruel, debilitating condition, that impacts carers and family members as well as patients, but there is hope
- Physical and mental exercise can help prevent or delay its onset, and improve memory and concentration
When it first started – names of people and places began to slip my mother’s mind – I called her forgetful. We all forget things, I reassured her. But I grew concerned at how much she forgot and when she couldn’t recall who I was. “When did we first meet?” she asked one evening, and I knew we were in trouble.
Dementia is a cruel condition, a sort of death by 1,000 cuts. It’s not a gradual decline, not a slow slope downhill. It’s an illness that happens in stages, steps. At lunchtime she understood our relationship, by the evening, it was: “When did we first meet?”
Devastating as it is, it’s not uncommon for a person with dementia to forget their connection to family members. As Jean Woo, a professor of gerontology and geriatrics at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, reminds me, this scenario has been highlighted in films, most recently in the Oscar-winning The Father. She says family members need to understand the underlying changes and devise appropriate responses to continue a supportive relationship.
“It is the beginning of a bereavement process, where death will occur as the final stage,” Woo says. That’s one of the reasons, she says, that “support in how to care for relatives with dementia is very important but not widely emphasised”.
