To help raise money and awareness for Alzheimer’s research, Home Instead Senior Care of Sonoma County will be at your local Rohnert Park Applebee’s Restaurant on Tuesday, September 21, 2010, from 4:00 – 8:00 p.m.

We invite you to bring your friends and family to dine together and Applebee’s will donate 15% of the meal proceeds to the Alzheimer’s Association.  CarsideToGo orders can be applied to this offer as well.

What:  Alzheimer’s Association Fundraiser

When:  Tuesday, September 21, 2010

Time:  4:00 – 8:00 p.m.

Where:  Applebee’s Restaurant – 500 Rohnert Park Expressway, Rohnert Park (this is the only participating restaurant).  Phone is 707-206-0660.

NOTE:  Please print out this blog post and bring it with you to take advantage of this offer.

We’ll see you there!  Thanks in advance for your support of Alzheimer’s Research!

UPDATE 3/8/10: This event only has 20 seats left and is booking fast.  Please RSVP today to reserve your seat.

Teepa Snow, renowned Alzheimer’s and Dementia expert, will be in Santa Rosa, CA, on March 22 for an all-day training and dementia workshop on Changing the World of Alzheimer’s. Event will be held 9-4pm at the Scottish Rite Masonic Center and is sponsored by Home Instead Senior Care of Sonoma County and Brighton Gardens. CEU Credits available. Additional senior home care seminar dates the week of 3/22 in San Francisco, Oakland, San Jose and Millbrae.

Teepa Snow, renowned dementia care and Alzheimer’s care expert, will lecture on “Changing the World of Alzheimer’s” on March 22nd, from 9-4pm, at the Scottish Rite Masonic Center in Santa Rosa.

Her training will include: 

• understanding of dementia (symptoms, progression and support that can help)
• demystifying resistance and
• coping with challenging behaviors during personal care activities

This all-day educational course is free to general public, and family caregivers, and has been approved for CEUs for registered nurses and health care professionals for small processing fee.

Teepa Snow is an occupational therapist specializing in dementia care and education. In addition to her private practice, Teepa has clinical appointments with Duke University’s School of Nursing and UNC-Chapel Hill’s School of Medicine. She is a frequent speaker on dementia care to gerontology and health care and nursing professional programs throughout the U.S.

In addition, Teepa Snow provides training and education to the Alzheimer’s Association, Alzheimer Society, state health care provider organizations, professional and caregiver associations.

For health care professionals, this all-day Santa Rosa course has been approved by the California State Board of Registered Nurses (BRN for RNs, LVNs, and CNAs) and is eligible for 6 CEU Credits, provider No. CEP 11967. MFTs and/or LCSWs has been approved by the California Board of Behavioral Sciences as well — 6 CEU Credits, provider No. PCE 987.

This dementia training event is sponsored by the senior in-home care professionals at Home Instead Senior Care of Sonoma County (Rohnert Park, CA) and by Brighton Gardens of Santa Rosa, CA — a Sunrise senior living community.

COST: $40 processing fee for CEU credits per attendee, $15 for CNAs. NO CHARGE for family caregivers or general public. Seating is limited. Lunch is included. Must RSVP in advance of event.

RSVP: For information and pre-registration, call 707.586.1516 which is the Rohnert Park office of Home Instead Senior Care or you can view details online at http://HomeInsteadSonoma.com/events.

Can’t attend March 22 in Santa Rosa? Home Instead is sponsoring additional Teepa Snow events that same week: March 23rd in Oakland, March 24th in San Francisco, March 25th in San Jose, March 26th in Millbrae. Call Home Instead Senior Care of Rohnert Park for more information and contact info for the other events: 707.586.1516.

In a medical news release issued Dec. 23, 2009 by Michael Purdy, a new study has affirmed that patients with cancer are less likely to develop Alzheimer’s disease, and patients with Alzheimer’s disease are less likely to get cancer.

“There were still people who had both Alzheimer’s and cancer, but it was significantly less common than we would expect,” says lead author Catherine M. Roe, Ph.D., research instructor in neurology at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. “If there truly is an inverse association, it gives us one more way of finding out what’s going wrong in both cancer and Alzheimer’s, and that could lead us to new ways to treat either condition.”

The study appears online Dec. 23 in the journal Neurology.  You can also view a detailed video with Dr. Roe available on the Washington University of St. Louis Video News Release site.

Hints of a disconnect between cancers and neurological disorders have been building for years. The effect was first noticed in patients with Parkinson’s disease, who get cancer less often; later studies have suggested that multiple sclerosis sufferers may have fewer tumors, and that Down syndrome patients who live to middle age or older have reduced incidence of cancer.

Six years ago, Maria Behrens, M.D., then a postdoctoral fellow at Washington University’s Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center (ADRC), noticed that few nursing home patients in her native Chile seemed to have cancer. Roe, Behrens and their colleagues conducted a study using data from research volunteers at the ADRC and found that people with Alzheimer’s disease were slower to develop cancer in the future.

For the new study, scientists followed 3,020 people aged 65 and older enrolled in the Cardiovascular Health Study, a National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute Study that gathered extensive health data on its participants. ADRC researchers monitored the subjects for an average of five years to see if they developed dementia and for an average of eight years to see if they were hospitalized for cancer. As the study began, 164 patients already had Alzheimer’s, and 522 patients had been diagnosed with cancer.

During the study, 478 people developed dementia, and 376 developed invasive cancer. Those who had Alzheimer’s disease at the start of the study were 69 percent less likely to be hospitalized for cancer treatment than those who did not have Alzheimer’s when the study began. Caucasian people who had cancer as the study began had 43 percent less risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease. The latter finding, however, was not apparent in minority groups.

To make sure that doctors or caregivers treating Alzheimer’s patients weren’t just too overwhelmed to notice the start of cancer, researchers also monitored cancer incidence in patients with vascular dementia. Scientists think this condition is caused by lack of blood to the brain.

“If the decreased chance of cancer diagnosis was simply due to the fact that physicians don’t notice cancer in people with dementia, the decrease should have shown up for both the Alzheimer’s patients and those with vascular dementia,” Roe says. “But the drop in cancer risk was only seen in those with Alzheimer’s.”

Could Alzheimer’s be killing patients before they can be diagnosed with cancer? Roe says epidemiologists have analytical techniques to adjust for such deaths. She also notes that patients with vascular dementia tended to die sooner than patients with Alzheimer’s, yet they still had a higher risk of cancer than patients with Alzheimer’s.

Roe cautions that the study was based on cancer hospitalization data, meaning that cases of benign, inoperable or otherwise untreated cancers could not be considered. She and her colleagues plan to study a larger patient population to see if Alzheimer’s disease changes risks of specific types of tumors, and if certain types of cancers have larger or smaller effects on Alzheimer’s risk.

As you may know, the caregivers of Home Instead Senior Care of Sonoma County have cared for many seniors with Alzheimer’s, ensuring that they’re comforted each and every day.  We help them to live life as independently as possible as the disease progresses.  If you have any questions about caring for a elderly loved one, simple give us a call at 707.586.1516 and we’ll be happy to schedule an immediate appointment to discuss your home care needs.

Roe CM, Fitzpatrick AL, Xiong C, Sieh W, Kuller L, Miller JP, Williams MM, Kopan R, Behrens MI, Morris JC. Cancer linked to Alzheimer’s disease but not vascular dementia. Neurology, Dec. 23, 2009.

Funding from the National Institutes of Health, the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, the National Institute on Aging, the Washington University Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center and the National Center for Research Resources supported this research.

Washington University School of Medicine’s 2,100 employed and volunteer faculty physicians also are the medical staff of Barnes-Jewish and St. Louis Children’s hospitals. The School of Medicine is one of the leading medical research, teaching and patient care institutions in the nation, currently ranked third in the nation by U.S. News & World Report. Through its affiliations with Barnes-Jewish and St. Louis Children’s hospitals, the School of Medicine is linked to BJC HealthCare.