Building brains — and hope

Alzheimer's disease can be scary and sad — "the longest goodbye," as LDS Hospital clinical neuropsychologist Kelly Davis Garrett puts it — but that doesn't mean it's hopeless.

That was one of the messages Saturday during the Deseret Morning News/Intermountain Healthcare Health Hotline. Alzheimer's, dementia in general, and strategies for managing memory loss were topics addressed by Nick Zullo of the Utah Alzheimer's Association and staff members of LDS Hospital's Geriatric Cognitive Clinic, including Garrett, clinical social worker Liz Garcia-Leavitt and Paige Preece, study coordinator of the clinic's Brain Builders program.

The Health Hotline, which ran from 10 a.m. to noon, received several dozen lengthy calls from Alzheimer's patients and their families looking for advice and reassurance.

"Activity — physical, mental and social" is the mantra of Alzheimer's clinicians, researchers and advocates, based on studies showing that exercise, mental stimulation and social engagement both improve and delay the disease.

But many well-meaning primary-care physicians, says Zullo, aren't familiar with this research and sometimes prescribe memory-loss medication without realizing that there are other treatments that also help. The Utah Alzheimer's Association, for example, is organizing "social clubs" for early stage Alzheimer's patients. A new club will soon be opening at the Magna Senior Center, and the association also has plans for a club in Utah County. For more information about the location of other clubs, contact the association at 265-1944.

LDS Hospital's Brain Builders program is still looking for patients to participate in its exercise study. Previous studies in mice programmed to have Alzheimer's have shown that mice who "exercised" on wheels were not only able to perform better on maze tests but were shown to have produced a protein that reduces the plaque and tangled neurons associated with the disease and to have actually formed new neural connections in the hippocampal area of their brains.

Exercise studies on people with a history of dementia have shown that exercise improved cognitive ability and delayed the onset of the disease.

One caller Saturday was an 83-year-old woman in the early stages of Alzheimer's who is also caregiver to a husband with Parkinson's disease. Zullo assured her that if she wants to participate in the Brain Builders study, his organization will help her find respite care and transportation.

Participants in the randomized study must currently be on a memory drug. For more information about the study, call 408-5498. For information about LDS Hospital's Geriatric Cognitive Clinic, call 408-8600.

A caller from Magna was interested in the social clubs for her mother, whose Alzheimer's has caused her friends to pull away. Interaction at the social clubs, Zullo says, help patients "re-awaken," improving both memory and mood.

The Utah Alzheimer's Association runs a 24-hour hotline at 1-800-272-3900. For more information about Alzheimer's disease, including "maintain your brain" strategies, go to www.alz.org.

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E-mail: jarvik@desnews.com