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Tag: Senior Care in Mesa AZ

Strategies for Handling Personality Changes with Dementia

Posted on by Craig Bass

If your elderly loved one has dementia, they are going to experience personality changes. At the early stages of this disease, you might not notice a lot of changes in your elderly loved one. However, as time goes on and the disease progresses, your elderly loved one will have more personality changes. With this being said, you might need to know how to handle the personality changes that your elderly loved one experiences. This guide can help you with this process.

Checking to See What Needs Aren’t Met

Some of the personality changes that your elderly loved one experiences might be related to unmet needs. There could be a wide range of things that your elderly loved one needs. Some of the things that you or the senior care provider should check for include the following:

  • Infections
  • Medication side effects
  • Pain or discomfort
  • Social structure changes
  • Emotional needs
  • Psychological needs
  • Hunger and/or thirst

If you and/or the senior care providers have met all of your elderly loved one’s needs, but there are still issues, you can also check for triggers.

Checking for Triggers

With dementia, there is often something that is triggering the personality changes. There is a specific way that you and senior care providers can check for triggers with your elderly loved one. This process includes the following:

  • Describing what is happening or has happened (this might tell you what is going on)
  • Investigating potential causes (based on what has happened, what may have triggered the changes)
  • Creating a plan (after determining the trigger, what plan can help?)
  • Evaluating that plan (Go through that plan to ensure it will, in fact, help your loved one)

If you go through this process, you can help to determine what triggered your elderly loved one’s personality changes.

Harmful Changes

In some instances, the personality changes that someone with dementia experiences are harmful. For instance, if they become severely depressed, this could increase the risk of suicide or other harmful behaviors. If you or the senior care providers suspect that your loved one’s personality changes are harmful, it is important to get them the help they need as soon as possible.

Conclusion

These are some of the strategies for handling personality changes with dementia. If your elderly loved one experiences personality changes, be sure to follow these tips. By doing so, you could help your elderly loved one to feel better.

Sources
https://alzheimers.med.umich.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/Personality-and-Behavior-Change.pdf

If you or an aging loved one is considering hiring senior care in Mesa, AZ, please call the caring staff at Golden Heart Senior Care of Scottsdale at (480) 284-7360. We are here to help!

How Can You Help Your Senior to Develop Good Eating Habits?

Posted on by Craig Bass

Less than healthy eating habits can cover a lot of ground for your senior. She might tell you outright that eating is an issue for her, or you might notice that things aren’t going well when her weight fluctuates or when her health issues become more challenging.

Educate Yourself about How She’s Eating Now

Before you can help your senior make different choices with her eating habits, it helps to know what her current habits are. Talk to your senior about what she’s eating and why. It’s also a good idea to talk to her about other aspects of choosing healthy eating habits, like what it feels like when she’s grocery shopping and cooking. If she dreads those tasks and hates being involved in them, she’s probably more likely to choose easy ways out.

Eating Alone Can Be a Huge Hindrance to Healthier Eating

Another factor that’s easy to overlook about healthy eating is that so many people do not enjoy eating alone. Your senior may have never really had to eat alone and maybe that’s dramatically different for her right now. Are there meals you can share with her a few times a week? Having something like that to look forward to can be more inspiring for her.

Figure out What Inspires Your Senior to Choose Healthier Foods

What else inspires your elderly family member to eat healthier foods or to be more consistent with meals? She might experience feeling better when she’s eating well, for instance. Or she might see the results in the numbers she gets back from her doctor’s office. Higher energy levels could be another motivating factor. Whatever it is that your senior sees as a benefit of eating better is important for you to know.

Focus Solutions on the Big Problem

Once you have a full picture of what is going on, you can start to put solutions in place for what’s really presenting an issue. Your elderly family member may need more help with meal preparation, even grocery shopping, or she may need more assistance with other areas so that she still has the energy to cook. That might mean bringing in elderly care providers, for example, or swapping out cooking duties with other family members. For the best results, you want to tailor the solution to the actual problem.

Putting a plan in place is the tough part. From there, you’re going to be able to help your senior to find the right way to implement and to adjust that plan to ensure that it keeps working for her.

If you or an aging loved one is considering hiring senior care in Mesa, AZ, please call the caring staff at Golden Heart Senior Care of Scottsdale at (480) 284-7360. We are here to help!