Hello again! My name is Louisa Strohm and this is a second blog post in continuation to my first post about Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI). If you would like to read that one first, which I do recommend you can find that here. In my first post I talked about what MCI is and what kind of effects it has on elderly people physically and mentally. I also talked about my personal connection with MCI, which is my grandmother. She was diagnosed with Mild Cognitive Impairment in 2013, and it affected not only her, but our entire family. We changed the way we did things around the house to try and help her condition. In this blog post I’d like to talk about some new facts and statistics I’ve found. I also got to sit down with my grandmother and my mother, her caretaker, to ask some questions about MCI and how they deal with it.
The first interview I conducted was with my grandmother. The first thing I had her tell me about was her daily routine. She told me that 3 days a week she babysits her 2 year old grandson Leo. If she isn’t watching him she’s doing laundry, watching her favorite game shows such as The Price is Right, or if it’s nice out she sits on the front porch, or she gardens. She also told me that during the spring and summer there is one thing that she never misses and that’s the Phillie’s game. During my interview she expressed many times that the medication she takes makes things much better. At the end of our interview she told me specifically to let the people know that if she didn’t have us girls, referring to me my sister, and mother, she would be sad, she said that she would hate to be alone.
The next interview I conducted was with my mother, the caretaker of my grandmother. She told me that her initial reaction to being told her mother has MCI was that she was upset with herself at first for not recognizing the signs and in denial about my grandmother’s condition. She told me about some of the things she does like leaving notes and filling my grandmother’s medicine for her that may not sound like they make a difference, but they do. She told me that she she normally is fine with my grandmother but sometimes gets frustrated with having to repeat herself but knows that it’s just part of her condition. She got emotional towards the end when I asked things people might not know when living with a person that has MCI. She got teary eyed and told me that it takes a lot of patience and love to care for anyone with any disease.
Since my last blog I’ve done some more research on the effects and ¨cures¨ of MCI. This Scientific American article I found, suggests that the risks of MCI and dementia are falling. Studies done in America and Europe tell us that over the past 25 years the risk of dementia and Alzheimer’s disease has been steadily falling. A study led by Carol Brayne at Cambridge University surveyed people over the age of 65 once in the 90’s and again somewhere around 2010. The results led them to believe that the dementia rate was decreasing by 24 percent.
There is lots more to discover and uncover in the always moving world of MCI, Dementia, and Alzheimer’s. I hope to come to some more conclusions and help more people overcome MCI.
If you would like to see my sources here’s the link to my Annotated Bibliography.
