studdering

my husband @59 was diagnosed with early on set alzheimers ..Almost 3 years later I have noticed that he's studdering more and more....I feel this is happening at an accelerated pace...Has any one experienced this

or noticed this as a caregiver?

[jeffcobb Ambassador]

Hi, its the forum nut. I noticed no one replied and since this was targeting caregivers I figured to wait.... but I can give you my crazy $0.02 if you want. As always, check with your doctor and consider the source.

I dont have AD and he isn't me BUT there is a whole lot of overlap between the two, in terms of symptoms. Stuttering is just one of some 15 different kinds of aphasia the NIH recognizes; you will have to go to their site to see them all with descriptions. However the common denominator is that both diseases have basically shot-gun blasted these protein deposits all over our brains, somethings effecting speech, resulting in aphasia, one type of which is stuttering. I do not stutter although sometimes I wish I did; for me the wrong word comes out, not like I call someone an asshole in the middle of the sentence but I do the rhyming/close/opposite game, a box might come out as a square, etc. Since AD (and LBD and PD) are all progressive, its only to be expected to find new defects in these common areas. I am only a few years younger than your hubby and you should have seen me at the doctor this morning trying to describe the awful side-effects of the muscle relaxer she prescribed last month. They made me sick to my stomach after an hour or two and do you think that would be simple to get out? Nope, she kept getting the impression I was telling her they were working TOO good and then it was ...oh never mind. This is one of those circumstances where you cant just say screw it and give up because if the meds are wrong, they are wrong for a month and there is zero chance of making them right. Long story short though is that if your hubby is stuttering and its frustrating you, its frustrating the poo out of him. I was ready to take hostages after a while today.

[jeffcobb Ambassador in reply to jeffcobb]

Hey; its me again, out-nerding the group by replying to myself. Hey we are watching Armageddon with a very young (and obviously worthless) Ben Affleck. Hey its that kinda night. Anyhow I just wanted to write to add that I didn't mean to dump on the caregiver, I really didn't. As Randy will tell you, sometimes the stuff we are fighting on the inside gives us a short fuse that we hate the hell out of in ourselves after the fact...but we are so slow sometimes and as it happens, with that slowness is fog and with that fog comes...a slowness to understand. Understanding is a vital skill to acting like an adult, which is why when our fog gets bad we can act or react like children. I do, I know others; its not a happy thing but it is a true one for at least some of us. Not at excuse, simply a reason. Things like excuses are kinda gone for us. Or maybe meaningless.

Anyhow, I made it seem too much on the caregiver but the truth is, its no ones fault or if it is, someone explain that part to me. From my perspective, in some ways big and some ways small we (the patient) watch our reality change over time. We have two ways of dealing with this, pretend we are still in the same one as everyone else or 'embrace the horror', face it head-on. The thing is, due to what a degenerative disease is, our reality will nothing but drift further away. Maybe someone at Hogwarts can do something about this but otherwise, thats pretty much your destiny baby. And thats how problems happen. Today, going to said doctor, my caregiver wife driving and me riding in a bright desert winter day. In her reality, Vegas traffic was about what it usually was, her cussing up a blue streak at points, calling some of the other drivers old ladies and stuff. IOW, SOS. In my reality, which was close to hers but not an exact match, a car suddenly appeared in front of ours as we were streaking down the 515 to get to the doctor. One instant the road was empty and open, the next it was there. Given more than a minute to remember I have dementia I would not have freaked out but to me, it was magic, it appeared there and in that instant I thought I saw it before the missus had. And I exclaimed "Whoa!". It was sheer surprise for me but she took it as a critique of her driving which started a whole 'nother thing. I was never able to explain what I had just seen. So I carried that around a bit too long. I knew after the fact that the LBD had screwed with my perceptions, we probably had approached the car quite slowly but I was in a fog, trying to pay attention to the driver speaking and the input from my eyes was obviously not being caught by the brain, and when it finally was, POOF the car seemed to appear like magic. This happens alot, people and things appearing and disappearing in my reality. Used to be a magician; you get used to it after a bit. The car just surprised me.

So maybe I took something out on you or just tried to strike back for the patients who keep stuff inside or...I don't know. What I do know is, I am sorry. What I said about stuttering is accurate to the best of my knowledge. The rest was un-called for.

Peace

Jeff

[ChristianElliott Partner]

The planning and production of speech involves a surprisingly complex coordination between many areas of the brain -- frontal cortex, parietal cortex, and cerebellum to name a few.

I have seen some anecdotal reports that (new) stuttering in people with Alzheimer's can be an early sign of aphasia. The potential path towards aphasia will be very dependent on an individual's disease progression, fwiw.

[jeffcobb Ambassador in reply to ChristianElliott]

What he said.