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My wife’s caregiver and I are the only ones to observe my wife’s symptoms over an extended period of time, of course I have witnessed the symptoms the most...Her GP and Neurologist only see her for 10-15 minutes at a time...and she will always put on a nice front for then.
I reviewed my wife’s symptoms with the caregiver....which have always been confusing to me since they don’t follow the standard progression of the disease...at least based on my research...
I explained that my wife has an iq of 130+ and is an expert at manipulation...and described her confusing symptoms...After she has spent time with her....she said that during out first discussion she really didn’t understand what I was observing and now she understands and that in all her years of experience she had never witnessed a Alzheimers patient exhibiting her combination of symptoms...
I describe it as selective short term memory....For example my wife obsesses over certain things all day....immediately picks up the same thoughts the next....she picks up right where she left off....Last night when she tried to turn me against the caregiver ( making up stories).... she immediately started on the same subject the next morning...Typically with short term memory loss she should forget...
I have many other examples.....that I can list...along with typical symptoms...
I think it is related to her high iq...which means she has the ability to move selected short term memories immediately into long term memory...(whereas the process of moving a short term memory to long term typically occurs after the memory is repeated, the learning process, another method is event related, such as memory related to an important event in your life, it moves to long term memory almost automatically)


Has anyone experienced this?

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In all truth your Mom's symptoms do not sound a great deal different than the symptoms of others with dementia. Sadly enough. And yes, her IQ may help her manipulate, but many with a low IQ are excellent at confabulation. This is why neuro exams are designed to bypass this "social" interaction with doctors over 15 minutes. This is the disease, and the progression of the disease, and it is not predictable. Alzheimers follows a slow sloping slide down, frontal temporal often has stairstep pattern level to level with some episodes of anger, Lewy's has some hallucination patterns that are different from both and can go up, down, high and low, and a person be great on one day and poor on another. Do all the research you can, keep diaries and notes. Get the proper MD for diagnosis. And remember, nothing about this disease will be "predictable".
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