Helping a Person With Alzheimer's Disease to Eat

Helping a Person With Alzheimer's Disease to Eat with Melissa B PhD

In the late stages of Alzheimer's disease, it's not unusual for older adults to have trouble eating. Before the end of life, 85% of people living with Alzheimer’s disease will have trouble eating.

There are many reasons for this, but many stem from the sensory changes that happen with the disease such as changes with smell, taste, vision, and hearing. Other contributing factors may involve chewing their food, swallowing, or they simply lose interest in food.

Ensuring that anyone with Alzheimer's eats a healthy meal or eats sufficiently turns into a real practical and emotional challenge for the caregiver.


In today's episode of This Is Getting Old, we'll talk about Alzheimer's Care: Making Mealtimes Easier. I'll share strategies that can help you help an older adult to eat more food.


Part One of 'Helping a Person With Alzheimer's Disease to Eat. '

The first step in understanding is the sensory changes that impact an older adult's ability to feed themselves.

These sensory changes are briefly described below;

Smell. Smell is diminished with Alzheimer's disease. As this disease progresses, people lose their sense of smell. They can't smell their body odor, they can't smell if there's smoke in the house, so they certainly have a hard time smelling food. This change also increases their risk for food poisoning.

Taste. Have you ever wondered why an older adult with Alzheimer's disease loves sweet food? Sugar fires up a part of your brain that remains intact throughout the disease. So if we need to put a little bit of sugar on somebody's food (and adjust their medical regimen accordingly if they have diabetes), to get them to eat more food, we should do that.

"For an older adult with Alzheimer's disease, adding a little bit of sugar to their food could be a good thing because sugar fires up a part of the brain that remains intact throughout the disease." -Melissa Batchelor, PhD, RN, FNP-BC, FGSA, FAAN

Hearing. If you only have Alzheimer's disease, you can still hear, but what happens is you lose the ability to use and understand language. It might seem like they can't hear us sometimes, but the reality is they can't understand us.

Vision. A person with Alzheimer’s disease will lose peripheral vision. With Alzheimer's disease, vision diminishes from scuba vision, to binocular vision, down to monocular vision.


Touch. The Palmer Reflex returns with late Alzheimer's disease. The Palmar Reflex is similar to when you put your finger in the palm of a baby's hand, and they grab it. That reflex comes back very late in this disease, making it difficult for older adults to use utensils, handle cups, and all the things that it takes to feed themselves.

Verbal and Visual Cues To Facilitate Ease in Feeding

When providing care to a person living with Alzheimer's disease, we already know to give people verbal and visual cues. However, late in the disease, they will have a hard time using and understanding language so what they pick up on is your nonverbal behavior.

So if you sit down and you're smiling, or you mimic chewing or whatever it is that you want them to do, that part of the brain remains intact even late in the disease (it’s called “Mirroring”). By using nonverbal cues, you're a lot more likely to get them to do what you want without using words.

READ THE FULL ARTICLE AT WWW.MELISSABPHD.COM

Want to Know More?

If you found this video helpful and would like to learn more strategies to improve meal intake, please visit my website at MelissaBPhD.com/shop. I’ve created an online course titled, “Optimizing Nutrition in Dementia Using Supportive Handfeeding”. I’ve adapted this course from my research teaching nursing home staff for family/ friend caregivers to teach you these skills.

This course teaches you the most recent evidence-based information we have for managing mealtimes in dementia – and you may even find it helpful for doing other care activities like combing someone's hair, brushing their teeth, or helping them to get dressed.

You can use the Coupon Code TIGO20 to get 20% off the course!

You can also find other videos related to Alzheimer's disease on my YouTube Channel (MelissaBPhD) and this website under podcasts + blogs.