Abstract
Pain is often unrecognized in the elderly with Alzheimer’s disease (AD). As a result, challenging behaviors such as resistance to care, hitting, screaming, biting, refusal to eat, and others are attributed to deliberate resistance by the person with Alzheimer’s, or it may be assumed that the disease has led to psychotic behavior which would warrant the use of antipsychotic drugs. However, a clinical assessment for pain is usually absent. Failure to recognize pain, then, often leads to overmedicating with powerful antipsychotic and antianxiety medications with all their attendant side effects. Let us take a look at a case study of a woman who was recently admitted to an assisted living facility.
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Notes
- 1.
See FDA website: http://www.fda.gov/Drugs/DrugSafety/PostmarketDrugSafetyInformationforPatientsandProviders/ucm152291.htm. Here is the black box warning: Elderly patients with dementia-related psychosis treated with antipsychotic drugs are at an increased risk of death. Risperdal [or other antipsychotic] is not approved for use in patients with dementia-related psychosis.)
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Benner Carson, V., Vanderhorst, K., Koenig, H. (2015). “If I knew My Loved One Was in Pain…”. In: Care Giving for Alzheimer’s Disease. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-2407-3_3
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