Has anyone had the opportunity to observe the reading and writing skills of someone with advanced Alzheimers? Is the patient who can no longer live alone still able to write legible sentences, use proper grammar and perfect punctuation? Just curious. Could someone be near end stage dementia, but, still able to write letters that are logical and without errors?
12 years of Catholic School education and no period? That told me that some core of my mom's brain was now gone.
We bought Christmas cards for her to just sign her name on. She couldn't do her first name in cursive(how she usually wrote it) - it's 5 letters long. She seemed to forget how the letters hooked together, it was tiny and cramped, completely unreadable.
I printed her name in big letters for her to look at to see if that would help her to print her name. She couldn't do that either, it came out tiny chicken scratch after the first letter.
She still seems to able to read, we bring her large print books and she can tell us what they are about. It takes her a lot longer to read a book now, but she seems to be reading them.
I find it hard to believe that someone with advanced Alz could write clearly and logically, at least from my experience with my mother in law.
My great aunt, by then in long term care, was asked to write a sentence of her own devising and she came up with "I am beginning to be hungry." (It had been a long morning!) She had no significant dementia, though.
My mother stopped being able to complete crosswords, and then not very long after her handwriting when a.w.o.l. too - she was repeating syllables within words and getting lost, it was incredibly demoralising for her. She had vascular dementia.
End stage dementia, no I wouldn't have thought a person would be able even to copy down words, let alone compose a sentence. You can probably check this point on line, though - Google cognitive assessments or something like that.