Are these or could these be signs of the beginnings of Alzheimers?

…he began to notice that she would on occasion use the wrong word for something…
I was afraid you were going to say that. It sounds possible. Mom had it, supposedly. I think the drugs were worse than the disease.

Oh, I wish them luck.

A doctor told a relative to have the person suspected of having Alzheimer’s to draw the face of a clock with the numbers. He said that even if they are looking at a clock they can’t draw it correctly.

I was with my mom when she took a verbal Alzheimer’s test. It was complicated! Even I had trouble keeping up! She passed with flying colors but, you know.

It certainly does sound like potentially the beginning of Alzheimer’s and yes, I do have some experience with it. Her doctor will give her a mini-mental test and can assess it more accurately if she is willing to go. You can watch the film “Away from Her” with Julie Christie in it and it shows the early stages of Alzheimer’s happening exactly like that. Another good fictional treatment is the book, later made into a movie, called “Alice is Still Here.” Nobody can tell the husband how much he should push his wife but it does seem like it could well be the early stages of Alzheimer’s.

I don’t know what the damn drugs are supposed to do, either. They just made my mom insane.
Eventually Mom went “home” to Washington state, where all of her family lived. My very pushy aunt, Mom’s sister, once told me, very theatrically, “There is no cure for it! There is nothing that can slow it down! There is nothing that can reverse it!”
I said, “Well, why do we have her on those powerful, mind altering drugs, then?”
She said, “Wait…what?” Left her speechless.

I forget the words for objects and people’s names. My Dr. Thinks it’s low blood sugar not alzhiemers. I took me 30 seconds to ask if I could borrow a vacuum cleaner. They said no. Don’t automatically go to dread disease first. It could be something simple.

@Dutchess_III Since you don’t know what drugs she was on or what they were for and we don’t know how long ago it was, it seems a bit foolish to rail against all Alzheimer treatment drugs. I do know there isn’t a cure but I have heard there are drugs such as Aricept that can help slow the disease down. The drugs you are talking about might have been anti-psychotics or another class of drugs all together. Certainly when it comes to it, seeing a psychiatrist or neurologist they can trust may well be beneficial for this couple

You said she was working overseas – could it be a language thing? I have several friends who are multi-lingual and occasionally stumble over words whilst trying to come up with the right language (especially after a glass of wine or four)

Why would you assume that @janbb? Of course I know what drugs she was on and what they were for! Aricept was one. Namenda was the second. And I certainly know when it was. The only thing that seemed to do any good was the anti-depressant they finally put her on. I could see a different, calmer person behind that fog of confusion that she was living in.
She was here for 10 years, and was sick for 3 years before she left. She died within a year of leaving, and I was in constant contact with her sister during that time.
At one point, while she was still here, the doctor changed her prescription. With the old drugs she took the pill twice a day. My stupid brother-in-law knocked on her door, handed her the new pills, told her she only needed to take them once a day, then left. She took two a day. By the second day she was hallucinating. Literally on the floor screaming. She never recovered from it. She continued to hallucinate for the rest of her short life.
My sister, and her doctor, just shrugged it off as being the nut case they thought she was.
Then my brother in law went back, took the new drugs back and said, “These aren’t working for you!” And gave her her old drugs back.

Sounds like a lot of mismanagement all around. I’m sorry you had that experience. Certainly dosages matter greatly.

When we were preparing to take her to Seattle, she stayed the last night with me. I woke up and she was talking to herself about what kind of little house she wanted. She described a flower garden, and a small vegetable garden. Of course, we were actually putting her in a nursing home. I didn’t know if I should say something or not. I decided I should. I wasn’t blunt…and she became very angry with me, saying I said that just to make her feel bad.
So, that day we flew to Washington. My sister and her oldest daughter went too. My sister walked 20 feet ahead, pretending not to know us, while I struggled to hang on to Mom and a garment bag in which I had packed framed pictures that she’d painted decades before. It was really heavy. I was really struggling. I was so relieved when my niece stepped up and offered to help.
My sister sat as far away from us as she could get.
We got to Renton, to my aunt and uncle’s. That night my sister said to our cousin, “So! Tomorrow’s plan is to drop Mom off at the home and then go to the Space Needle!” Lex in charge. Everyone was shocked into silence. She pretended not to notice.
The next day, afterward, I couldn’t stop crying. It was a wrenching, soul shattering cry. I had locked myself in a room and was screaming into a pillow, ripping at the sheets. I do believe it’s what it was what one would feel like if one of your kids died.
My sister had a pleasant visit at the Space Needle. Then she went home.
I stayed for 5 days, and visited with her every day. She was so upset, but she was such a trooper. I did every thing I could think of to help her be comfortable.
After I got home I called her every day. Then one day I called…and she couldn’t talk. Nobody warned me. I asked to talk to a nurse. It appears she had had a stroke the night before. Completely incoherent. NOBODY WARNED ME.
Eventually she went catatonic, for about 6 months. Then she managed to convey that she didn’t want to eat any more, by clamping her teeth together at feeding time.
She died later on that week.

And that’s just the tip of the nightmare. Now you may understand why it upset me when you assumed I didn’t know what I was talking about @janbb.

Alzheimer’s is one specific disease in a very large group of diagnoses called Dimentia. Some of the symptoms can also be the result of a silent TIA (Trans-Ischemic Attack). If it is a TIA, it sounds to me like this may have occured in the left side of the brain. I would start looking for right side neurological deficits. If symptoms get worse, you might have some other kind of progressive organic brain pathology going on—not necessarily Alzheimer’s, and not necessarily incurable. Early diagnosis is of the utmost importance.

Your friend needs clinical information, not uninformed opinion, rojo.

Tell him to read this, from the Mayo Clinic

Then this, from the Alsheimer’s Association

Then this from WebMD.

This is the Alzheirmer’s and Dimentia Toolkit including the MMSE (the “mini mental exam” that @2david2 refers to below.) similar to what I used as an RN while working in geriatric mental health. He might want to look at that. The whole kit, including the MMSE is in downloadable, printable pdf format.

The most important thing is that her husband gets her to a doctor for an examination. Reading all the above might help him do that. It will cerainly bring him up to date on the diagnostic process involved in ruling out and detecting Alzheimers.

A proper early diagnosis for whatever the cause of her dimentia is of the utmost importance.

My mom has Alz and here’s what I want to add to the discussion:
The “mini-mental” test that @janbb mentions is a good start to try to pin down whether she may have the beginnings of the disease. There are also other more extensive tests. The symptoms that the OP mentions are concerning. Here are other things to watch for: does she repeat herself? Does she say something to you, and then say it again, not weeks or days later, but just hours later, as if she had never said it to you? Do YOU tell her something and she doesn’t remember it shortly afterwards? Does she get lost in a place that she should be very familiar with? Does she go out for a walk and not know how to get back home?
The drugs don’t slow down the progression of the disease. Aricept and Namenda did nothing for my mom. Risperdal gave her the shakes and made her very combative. Only Seroquel seems to calm her down and be of some help. My mom has shown very obvious signs of the disease since 2010, but in retrospect, even in 2003–4 we think she was already having trouble. In those years she had several minor car accidents, but somehow we brushed those off. Heck, anyone can have a minor car accident, right? She also used to keep meticulous financial records, but after we moved her to a memory care facility, we went through her stuff and discovered that starting in the 2004 the records she kept were quite messy and she had lost control over those, and by 2005 she stopped altogether. She couldn’t remember how much she had in her checking account, so she would stop often at the bank to find out what the balance was. That’s how she compensated for her loss of function. Another was when she went grocery shopping. She could not find what she wanted, and I don’t mean hard-to-find exotic brands, I mean things like eggs. She would compensate by asking store personnel where the stuff was. So that ‘s another thing to watch for: does she ask for assistance with things that she used to do just fine herself?

Finally, I want to say that the Alice book that @janbb mentions was made into an excellent movie, “Still Alice”. The actress that portrayed the Alz patient, Julianne Moore, won the Academy Award for Best Actress. Highly recommended.

Is it possible she’s depressed? I think depression can cause some unusual stuff.

@2davidc8 Yes! The book and the movie are both called Still Alice. I had forgotten that. :-P

If your friend’s wife does start on Alzheimer’s meds, please ask him to watch her carefully, and please don’t assume that all of the stuff he may see is due to the illness. I think some get lost because no one trusts them any more. Any odd thing is chalked up to the illness.
When my mother overdosed on the Namendah, I called the nurse of the doctor my sister had chosen for her. I told her what had happened. She just blew me off, saying that the hallucinations were just part of the disease. They were so obviously the result of overdosing, happening as they did, the very night that she took the second pill, within an hour of the second pill, the response flabbergasted me.
But the other part of the problem may have been my sister insisting that Mom had not taken too many. She said she counted them, or something. Mom TOLD me she had taken two. “I took one in the morning and one at night like I’m supposed to!!” My sister just said Mom didn’t know what she was talking about.
She should never have been allowed to self medicate.

He has talked her into at least agreeing to see a doctor but she is insisting on waiting until her regular scheduled appointment.

It’s a step.