How popular hayfever pills 'could raise Alzheimer's risk' by more than 50% | Daily Mail Online

How popular hayfever pills 'could raise Alzheimer's risk' by more than 50% | Daily Mail Online

• Sleep remedies, hayfever pills and anti-depressants are linked to dementia
• The risk is greatest when high doses are taken over several years
• Risk was 54 per cent higher for people taking the highest doses 
• Found a link between dementia and antihistamines Piriton and Benadryl
• Link was found with sleep remedy Nytol and anti-depressant Doxepin
• Also found with Nytol and Ditropan - treatment for an overactive bladder

By Jenny Hope for the Daily Mail
Published:
04:25 EST, 27 January 2015

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Common over-the-counter hayfever pills could raise your risk of Alzheimer’s, warn researchers.

They found a link between dementia in older people and anticholinergic
drugs, which include the antihistamines Benadryl and Piriton, as well as
sleep remedy Nytol and some older antidepressants.

These medications affect the brain by blocking a key chemical messenger
called acetylcholine, which has a range of functions in the body. 

Popular hayfever pills such as Benadryl and Piriton, sleep remedy Nytol, Ditropan - which is used to
treat an overactive bladder, and the antidepressant doxepin have all been linked to dementia The dementia risk is greatest when high doses are taken over several years, the US study found.

Many of the drugs are more commonly taken by older people, with up to half
of the UK’s elderly population being prescribed at least one
anticholinergic medication.

Study  leader Professor Shelly Gray, of the University of Washington School of
Pharmacy, said no one should simply stop taking the drugs without
speaking to their doctor. 

WHICH MEDICINES ARE LINKED TO ALZHEIMER'S? 

Researchers found a link between anticholinergic medications and dementia. 

Anticholinergic medications affect the brain by blocking a key chemical messenger
called acetycholine, which has a range of functions in the body.

People taking the following drugs for more than three years have an increased risk of dementia:

• At least 10 milligrams(mg) per day of the antidepressant doxepin, 
• Four mg per day of diphenhydramine (Nytol, Benadryl) or 
• Five mg per day of oxybutynin (Ditropan) for overactive bladder 

For those taking the highest doses of these drugs, the risk of dementia was
increased by 54 per cent after seven years, compared with no use.

The risk of Alzheimer's - the most common form of dementia - was increased by 63 per cent. 

But she said: ‘Healthcare providers should regularly review their older
patients’ drug regimens, including over-the-counter medications, to look
for chances to use fewer anticholinergic medications at lower doses.’

Research last year linked the use of anticholinergic drugs with mental
impairment in the elderly. But the new study, in the journal JAMA
Internal Medicine, is the first to show that the higher the dose, the
higher the risk of dementia.

Researchers tracked 3,434 men and women aged 65 and over for around seven years
while monitoring their use of anticholinergic drugs. Of the total, 637
developed Alzheimer’s and 160 were affected by other forms of dementia.

For those taking the biggest doses of anticholinergic drugs, the risk of
dementia was 54 per cent higher than those using none. The risk of
Alzheimer’s was 63 per cent higher.

Of the drugs named in the study, an increased risk of dementia was seen in
people taking at least 10mg a day of the antidepressant doxepin, 4mg a
day of diphenhydramine (which is in Nytol and Benadryl) or 5mg a day of
oxybutynin (Ditropan) for an overactive bladder for at least three  years.

Many newer drugs to treat these conditions do not have anticholinergic
effects, such as the antidepressant Prozac and antihistamines such as
loratadine (Claritin).

Anticholinergic drugs block a chemical transmitter called acetylcholine, leading to
side effects such as drowsiness and poor memory. People with Alzheimer’s
disease are known to lack acetylcholine.
Dr Simon Ridley, of Alzheimer’s Research UK, said more research was
needed, adding: ‘This large study adds to some existing evidence linking
anticholinergic drugs to a small increased risk of dementia, but the
results don’t tell us that these drugs cause the condition.’

For people who took the highest doses
of these drugs for the seven-year study period, the risk of dementia was
increased by a statistically significant 54 per cent compared with no
use. The risk of Alzheimer's was raised by 63 per cent

What is dementia? Alzheimer's Society explains (related)

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-2927002/Popular-sleep-remedies-hayfever-pills-DOUBLE-risk-Alzheimer-s.html#ixzz3Q19z6Ui6

I Never Expected My Mother to Be Diagnosed With Alzheimer's When I Was 26 | Rebecca Emily Darling

I Never Expected My Mother to Be Diagnosed With Alzheimer's When I Was 26 | Rebecca Emily Darling

Posted:
01/05/2015 9:12 am EST


Updated:
10 minutes ago

September 2012

"Oh look," said my
mother in a sing-song voice, pointing wistfully ahead, "it's the man in
the moon. We haven't seen him in a while, but there he is. He's so
bright tonight, but that's him."

We were driving down the street I
grew up on and the sun was large and orange and just beginning its trek
down toward the horizon. We slowed to a stop at a red light and were
squinting into the brightness, and while I have grown used to odd
exclamations from my mother, this one struck me as something different,
as a magical clue to the dwindling world inside her head.

I turned
over her words, puzzling over them and looking at the sun and trying to
see what she saw. What a beautiful world, I thought, where the moon is
the man in the moon and tonight the moon just happens to be enormous and
orange and blindingly bright, and the night sky behind him glows,
streaked with pinks and yellows and the occasional dab of blue.

What a majestic world wherein such a thing as that is so exceedingly normal that one might say simply, Oh, there's the man in the moon. My, isn't he bright tonight?

October 2013

My
mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer's and dementia about two years ago.
It was in the early stages then, and manifested mostly in a confusion
about numbers and the Internet and entirely irrational mood swings and
paranoia. To me, she merely seemed more unpleasant than usual. My mother
had always been prone to irrationality, so the early symptoms didn't
seem that out of character.

But despite her flaws, my mother had
always been an exceedingly brilliant woman. She was a gifted historian,
renowned in her field, and students still study -- and will likely
continue to study -- her texts and translations, long after she is gone.
When the symptoms of Alzheimer's first began, the most obvious sign of
them was that she was no longer able to hide the more damaged parts of
herself from her friends and colleagues; that she was no longer able to
direct them only at her family and only in private. And so when her
friends first began to tell me and my sister that something about our
mother was "off," our initial response was, "Well, yeah."

November 2013

This
woman looks like my mother. She sounds like my mother. She smells like
my mother. There is that visceral feeling when I hug her, that I am
hugging the woman I came from, the woman of whom I am a piece, a rib.
But each time she opens her mouth, I find that she is just an echo.

The
thing is, none of my mother's defects ever made me love her any less. I
loved -- and love -- her fiercely, and while she was often not the best
mother, I always knew that she loved me into oblivion -- into an insane
place where only mothers and children are able to exist -- and the two
of us, both easily dramatic and equally troubled, were tangled in a
heated codependency for just about as long as I can remember. I could
count on my mother to say terrible things and I could count on her to
love me ferociously, and when that is what you've grown up with and the
way you've always been loved, those things are one and the same.

February 2014

My
sister and I have counted on our fingers the ways in which our mother
is kinder now, more appreciative, more gentle since the Alzheimer's.

One
morning, I was making breakfast for her in her kitchen (my mother can
no longer cook or figure out how to pair or prepare ingredients), and I
remembered that neither of us had taken our medications yet that day. I
said, "We'll take them together." When she asked me why I took
medication, I felt my eyebrows draw together. "Because I'm bipolar," I
told her uncertainly.

"You are?" she asked.

"Yes," I said, so puzzled that this was something she could forget.

"You don't seem like someone who's bipolar," she said.

I laid out all six of her morning pills in a row beside a glass of water and said wryly,

"That's funny. You used to tell me all the time that I was crazy."

"I did?" she asked.

"Yes,"
I said, "all the time." She paused, the look on her face like something
you might see from a gentle bird who has just flown into a window and
is dazed.

"Well, I guess I wasn't a very good mother," she said, and softly laughed.

My
heart dropped and then pounded painfully. "Oh yes you were," I said,
hugging her to me so that she could not see my tears. "You were an
amazing mother."

It was half-lie and half-truth, but it didn't
matter either way. That something as awful as Alzheimer's could give my
mother's mind enough empty space that she could see herself from outside
of herself, for the first time ever in her life, was touching. And it
was sad.

May 2014

I can see the Alzheimer's
progressing. My mother forgets words more and more frequently. Words
like "ring" and "grapes" and "cats" (she has taken to referring to my
cats as "those big things at Becky's apartment," which she pairs with a
hand gesture that is more suggestive of spider legs or jelly fish than
of anything related to a cat.) She can barely read at all, and doesn't
remember anything she's read almost immediately after she has read it,
but she does like to sit with a book from time to time. She likes to
feel the pages in her hands and she still reads the newspaper every day,
albeit all day long because each time it is new.

She still has a
vague but passionate sense of the news and politics and loves discussing
them; in fact, little makes her happier. There is a part of her still
attached to the academic side of herself, although she is not aware of
it. But she has not even opened the door to her office -- the door that
leads to walls covered in shelves holding book after book after book,
including some of her own, and folders haphazardly splayed across the
room full of documents and notes scribbled in foreign languages -- in at
least a year. Every time I visit her and walk down that hall, I see
that door so poignantly, so utterly closed. That part of her mind is
simply gone.

August 2014

One night, my
mother fell down the stairs and I ran to her. I held her like a mother
holds a child and asked again and again if she was okay. I clutched her
to me and rocked her. I felt completely responsible for her and more
protective of her than I have ever felt of anyone; just the very idea of
her being in pain cut through me. I would do anything to make it
better. I would do anything to make my mother better. I would even give
her up as my mother if it meant she would be living her life as herself,
even if it was without me, even if it was somewhere where I could not
see her. I would do anything.

I try to appreciate her for who she
is now, to appreciate the gentleness and the unabridged and
uncomplicated love she has to offer, but knowing and feeling that I've
lost her, there are times when I believe I would prefer that she hurl
all of that past fights and tears at me all at once if it meant having
her back with me now. If it meant that she would have her brilliant,
glorious mind back and that I could look at her again and know that
nobody, nobody on this earth knows me better than this woman, that this
is the one person who can take all the screaming fights that we can
readily invoke -- and therefore see the absolute worst that my person
has to offer -- and will still love me and love me ferociously.

I
am accustomed now to having a mother with Alzheimer's. I am accustomed
to not having a mother on whom I can depend, in whom I may confide, with
whom I may simply converse. And when I think of how accustomed I am, my
heart breaks all over again. It is a constant ebb and flow, a constant
healing and breaking again like the ocean.

December 2014

I
started this essay in October of 2013. It has now been three years
since my mother was first diagnosed, although it feels closer to 20. My
mother has lost so much of her vocabulary and short-term memory that a
conversation with her is now a couple of oftentimes nonsensical
sentences on loop. Her gait is a tiny shuffle and the extreme difficulty
with which she rises from sitting comes not from any physical ailment,
but from the difficulty her mind has wrapping around even the simple
shift in bearing we all take for granted. She lives in an assisted
living home now with around-the-clock care, and she is happy with all
the safeness and predictability that provides. The worse her illness has
gotten, the quieter her once haphazard mind has become, and I can
almost see the sense of peace and simple joy that has descended upon her
like a cozy blanket or a fresh layer of powdered snow.

It is a
blessing of unspeakable depth that my mother is happy. I am so
massively, overwhelmingly grateful for this simple truth that I am
unable to even think the words without melting into tears of exhausted
relief. I would never have guessed that feeling fortunate could hurt
just as much as feeling loss, and could be equal parts awful and
sublime. The sheer depth of my gratitude feels almost transcendent to
me; if I had been raised differently, I might think that I was feeling
God.

As things stand, I was raised by academics. As things stand, I
am simply bowled over by the immense beauty that is the heart's
capacity to feel so much: so much pain and so much love and so much
anger and gratitude and strength and vulnerability. It is a wonder that
we are able to walk about in the world with such a capacity inside of
us.

I miss my mother. I will never not miss my mother. I will go
months or perhaps -- though I cannot imagine this now -- years without
crying for her and then one day I will cut my finger on a knife in the
kitchen, and I may suddenly collapse into disproportionate tears that
will be some small, childlike part of my mind echoing back a long ago
feeling of a mother's comforting kiss. I will have children of my own
and I will learn that my heart is capable of much more, so much more
love and pain and vulnerability than even this experience has taught me.


If I have learned one thing from my mother's disease, it is that
the heart has no limit to what it can feel. There is always a deeper
love, and always a truer pain. And when I see my mother's eyes light up
at the sight of a simple flower or a chocolate chip cookie, I know that
there is always a purer joy as well.

Unlike our minds, unlike our memories, our hearts are infinite.

You can follow Rebecca Emily Darling (and her cats and vintage dresses) on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.

This post originally appeared on HelloGiggles.com.