Alzheimer’s: Dirty dressing, bad parking and swearing are symptoms of the disease

Memory loss, confusion, and disorientation are three well-known symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease.

However, there are dozens of subtle behavioral changes that can signal the brutal, life-threatening condition.

Before the most devastating symptoms of the disease begin, patients may experience a change in humor and begin to wear dirtier clothing.

And scientists this week uncovered another potential sign.

Researchers at the University of Southern California (USC) found that seniors who are more willing to give money to a stranger have a higher risk of getting hit.

Alzheimer’s affects an estimated 850,000 people in the UK and 5.8 million in the US, but charities fear the number will increase worldwide over the next few decades as the population ages.

Here, MailOnline reveals some of the other unusual signs that you or a loved one may have Alzheimer’s.

distribute money

It is known that the elderly are more at risk of being defrauded.

But recent research also shows that giving away money can be an early sign of Alzheimer’s disease.

Researchers from USC and Bar-Ilan University in Israel found that financial altruism was significantly associated with being in the early stages of the disease.

The researchers recruited 67 seniors in their 70s for the study.

Each participant was paired with another person they had never met before in a lab setting and were given $10 (£8) to split between them.

Older participants also underwent neurological testing to assess their current cognitive status and potential risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease.

The researchers suggested that those who were willing to give more money to someone they had never met before also tended to have worse cognition, which puts them at greater risk for Alzheimer’s.

Their findings, which they published in Alzheimer’s Diary, suggested that the effects of the disease on the brain may be a ripple effect that makes people more vulnerable to money distribution.

Dr. “Difficulty managing money is considered one of the first signs of Alzheimer’s, and this finding supports this idea,” said Duke Han, professor of neuropsychology at USC who led the study.

Changes in humor

Being a big Mr Bean fan could be another sign of Alzheimer’s, according to research.

Researchers at University College London (UCL) have found that people suffering from the disease are more likely to enjoy nonsense in satirical or absurd comedy shows than healthy adults of the same age.

Friends and relatives of 48 people with Alzheimer’s disease and frontotemporal dementia (FTD) (a rare type of dementia that causes problems with behavior and language) were surveyed about a loved one’s passion for different types of comedy.

People were asked if they liked slapstick comedies like Rowan Atkinson, satirical comedies like South Park, or absurd comedies like The Might Boosh.

Relatives were also asked if their relatives had changed their preferences in the past 15 years and if they had noticed inappropriate humor recently.

The study, published in Alzheimer’s Diary in 2015, found that people with Alzheimer’s disease preferred slapstick jokes about nine years before the onset of typical dementia symptoms.

People with FTD were more likely to laugh at tragic events in the news or in their personal lives, or events that others would not find funny, such as a poorly parked car or a barking dog.

More research is needed to determine the exact cause of the changes in humor, but most of the behavioral changes after the development of Alzheimer’s disease are due to brain shrinkage in the frontal lobe, the researchers said.

dirty dress

Alzheimer’s patients may also have difficulties in choosing clothes suitable for them and wearing clothes suitable for the climate if they are not helped.

Researchers from the Universities of Kent and York have described how people with dementia, often caused by Alzheimer’s disease, dress properly.

The research, published in 2018 in Sociology of Health and Disease, studied 32 people in three nursing homes and 15 regular homes in Kent.

He also interviewed 29 health workers and their relatives and 28 nursing home workers to get their opinions on how people with dementia should dress.

Melissa, one of the caregivers named in the study, described the devastation she experienced after her father started to change clothes when he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease.

He said, “I’ve never seen my dirty father. Never. Until that day, I entered the house and he was sitting there with his clothes disheveled, which made me very sad because I am not used to it, not at all”.

Caregivers also described the difficulties in dressing, guiding and encouraging people with more advanced dementia.

Dressing changes can result from a variety of Alzheimer’s disease effects, from forgetting accompanying clothes to muscle stiffness and sudden, jerky movements that make it difficult to put on.

bad parking

According to studies, driving in Alzheimer’s patients can worsen significantly as the condition begins to affect their motor skills and thinking processes.

The disease slows people’s reactions, makes them worse when parking, and eventually forces them to hand over their car keys.

Stopping driving can often cause stress and agitation for people in a state of memory deprivation due to the perceived sacrifice in autonomy.

Researchers from the University of Washington in St. Louis studied the driving habits of 139 people over the course of a year to see how the disease had affected them. Half were diagnosed with early Alzheimer’s, the other half went undiagnosed.

The study, published in 2021 in Alzheimer’s Research and Therapy, found that people with the disease were significantly more likely to make sharp changes in direction and drive more slowly.

The changes were so strong that the researchers were able to build a model for predicting whether people had Alzheimer’s based on driving styles alone.

The model accurately predicted cases in 90% of people.

swear

Another symptom of Alzheimer’s can turn into a potty, especially in inappropriate situations.

For example, the filter people normally use to avoid cursing in front of children is no longer as strong as it used to be, leading to more rudeness.

Researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles found that 18% of people with FTD used the word “f**k” when asked to name words that begin with “f”. This cannot be compared to any of the Alzheimer’s patients.

In a study of 70 patients, published in Cognitive and Behavioral Neurology in 2010, patients were asked to count as many words as they could think in one minute using the letters “f”, “a” and “s”.

While the study did not provide any raw data, it did show that six of 32 dementia patients said the bad word when asked to list the “f” word, and more said the word “shit” before the “s”.

you don’t have a filter

As with the bait, the ability to filter what Alzheimer’s patients say and how they act tends to degenerate in many cases as Alzheimer’s patients’ brains change.

People may become rude, say inappropriate things, undress in public, or start talking to strangers more often than before.

Experts say patients may also lose their sexual inhibition in some situations, such as touching inappropriately in public.

They believe the change is due to a narrowing of the frontal lobes of the brain in the frontal prefrontal cortex, the part that controls our filter.

The Alzheimer’s Association states, “These situations can be very confusing, disturbing, shocking, or frustrating for someone with dementia, as well as for their loved one.

A person with dementia may not understand why their behavior is viewed as inappropriate. They are unlikely to be intentionally inappropriate”.