My husband was diagnosed with "an Alzheimer's type of dementia" a little over a year ago after a brief hospitalization, but had been experiencing memory issues for the year prior. He now exhibits behaviors from stages 2-6. It is a horrible roller-coaster ride - having to call 911 a week ago after 30+ hours of not sleeping and increasing agitation resulting in violence and a fall. I have had him tested for UTI on several occasions. This time he had all tests plus two cat scans, EKG, electrolytes, etc. all were normal except increased brain tissue shrinkage. I am imagining that the co-pay on this 8-hour stint in the ER will run at least $1000, not including the ambulance. He has been started on seroquelat 50mg, but now down to 1/2 tablet as he was sleeping too much. I almost hated to cut the dose because at least it calmed him down and life was a little easier for two days. Yet he can do things that surprise me, and then the frontal lobe stuff takes hold. He is sooooo sneaky and paranoid and obsessive and more, then takes out the trash, rinses dishes and puts them in the dishwasher. I never know who I will meet any given morning or who will be here when the sun goes down!
She started with short term memory loss, judgement issues, sundowning, incontinence, and paranoia. This combination isn't necessarily characteristic of either vascular dementia or Alzheimers'. Testing ruled out dementia with Lewy bodies. The sundowner's now (in mbeginningsiddle stage) is mostly absent, but her other symptoms have worsened. But as others have said, staging is limited. "If you've seen one Alzheimer's patient, you've seen one Alzheimer's patient."
As Talkey says, a person can have more than one type of dementia, making the "stages" very hard to track.
All any of us can do (including the doctors) is deal with the symptoms as they present themselves. If they occur in some kind of predictable order, that is helpful. But they very often don't.
his doctor and maybe he can be put on risperidone .
I found this helped my husband a lot.
I thought he was doing so well I tried to ween him off of the pill.
Within one day his symptoms came back so I put him right back on it.