My Derranged rant about Misdiagnosis of Alzheimer's Disease

T

tharedhead

New member
Thanks to the fact that we have a major shortage of gerontologists (doctors who specialize in treating the elderly) in the US, many many old people are misdiagnosed with Alzheimer's every year. My cousin's husband's Mom was recently misdiagnosed and placed in a nursing home. Thanks to my loud screeching...I mean urging :laughing:...she was seen by a gerontologist and a neurologist. It turned out she actually had B-12 deficiency and is now improving with B-12 shots.

If anybody here has an elderly relative who has been diagnosed by their primary care physician as having Alzheimer's, without additional testing-please consider a neurology consult and a second opinion from a trained gerontologist.

Here is another disease that is commonly misdiagnose as alzheimers-Normal Pressure Hydrocephalus or NPH (bet you never heard of it :crazytongue:)My Mom's friend had this and recovered completely after surgery.

http://alzheimers-disease.suite101.com/article.cfm/nph_misdiagnosed_as_alzheimers

"Five to ten percent of all cases of dementia may be attributed to NPH. The National Council on Aging estimates that up to 750,000 Americans have NPH. Only 11,500 cases a year are correctly diagnosed and treated."

more info:
http://www.ninds.nih.gov/disorders/normal_pressure_hydrocephalus/normal_pressure_hydrocephalus.htm

There, now I feel better :sunny:. Sometimes I get so upset about the state of health care I could just pop :cussing:

Thank you for letting me vent.
 
:sunny: Thanks for posting that very useful information. You are so right. I worked in elderly services for several years and one of the biggest complaints I had was that doctors do not treat seniors the same as they do younger clientele. So many are quick to diagnose as if this age group has already lived long enough. By all means if your elderly parent is having problems ALWAYS get a second opinion.
 
There is a book, written several years ago, which suggested that many people that are diagnosed with Alzheimer's Disease are actually stricken with Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (the human version of bovine spongiform encephalopathy "BSE" -- Mad Cow Disease). The doctors who wrote the book think that many of the symptoms of Alzheimer's Disease are the same as early-stage CJD, and are misdiagnosed by doctors because they don't know what to look for, and so...Alzheimer's Disease becomes the catch-all disease for what ails many elderly folk.

The book made a lot of sense, and was pretty scary in it's implications for humans. Here is another link to CJD in humans, and studies which indicate a link with Alzheimer's Disease: http://www.fortunecity.com/healthclub/cpr/349/cjdfacts.htm
 
Prion diseases are common, frightening and research into them is quite underfunded (in these days when drug companies tend to focus on important things like erectile dysfunction and male pattern baldness :laughing:).
My roommate will eventually need a corneal transplant and I'll spend all my time afterwards waiting for him to come down with either nvCJD or rabies. :cry:

Cin and I were recently talking about the link between prion disease and squirrel brains.
http://www.mad-cow.org/~tom/victim23.html

Doctors that can't even be bothered to do something as simple as a cheap effective bloodtest for B-12 certainly won't be looking for prion disease. :nono:
 
Even the actress "Estelle Getty" was misdiagnosed. They said she had Alzheimer, then found it was Dimentia.

Then you have the children of an aging parent who are too embarrassed to bring the mother in for diagnosis (personal experience).

Then they have the insurance companies who won't approve vital test until it's sometimes too late (MRI's come to mind).

If you think our medical system is bad, you should see how bad the government-socialized healthcare is in other countries. My family in Germany has to deal with even worse when they need medical care.
 
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