IPA Press Releases

Retrogenesis: landmark Alzheimer's research adds scientific precision to the phrase

VANCOUVER, B.C. (Aug. 16, 1999) - The president of the International Psychogeriatric Association, Dr. Barry Reisberg of New York, says that new Alzheimer's research demonstrates that the way we care for patients may be precisely the opposite of what they need.

Dr. Reisberg will deliver opening remarks this morning to IPA's ninth international congress. About 2,000 psychiatrists, neurologists, scientists and related health professionals from 50 countries of the world will hear him describe research that led to a new word in the Alzheimer's lexicon: retrogenesis.

Over 20 years, science has identified seven major stages and 16 levels to mark the physical and mental deterioration of an Alzheimer's patient. Dr. Reisberg's earlier contributions to this process include the well-known GDS, the Global Deterioration Scale, and FAST, the Functional Assessment Staging Scale.

Retrogenesis brings more definition to the process. Clinical and neurological studies have compared the mental and physical stages of infant and child development to the reverse process of Alzheimer's deterioration. These studies document that an Alzheimer's patient with mental ability and habits similar to those of a 12-year-old child, will regress to levels of successively younger children and even infants. Meticulous study of individual behavior traits parallels the decline, enabling better planning for care. Children at certain ages get anxious if left alone, develop fantasies and start rushing back and forth. It can be seen that Alzheimer's at the same developmental stage produces the same result. Babies grasp people's hands or automatically suck bottles, just as Alzheimer's patients develop the same instinctive responses in parallel stages.

"In nursing homes alone, we have 500,000 final stage Alzheimer's patients in the United States and about one million in all stages combined," Dr. Reisberg said. "That is more than the population of all other patients with all other illnesses in U.S. hospitals. For most of these people we do little more than house, feed and clean them. Can you imagine the results if babies were given no more attention than that?"

Dr. Reisberg's research demonstrates that Alzheimer's patients who have been given the appropriate amounts of love, care and attention at each level of their decline "do almost unbelievably well, especially in the most severe stage when they are essentially as vulnerable as infants." However, the use of "love" in any physical sense by professional caregivers in modern medicine is viewed to be "tantamount to assault."

"The kind of care we are giving is often just the opposite of what they need," he said. But he didn't minimize the challenge: "We don't have a million mothers available to provide love." Retrogenesis research, he hopes, will assist in the planning and management of care. "The cost issues are as big as any in medicine."

Dr. Reisberg is a professor of psychiatry at the New York University School of Medicine and clinical director of the NYU Medical Center's Aging and Dementia Research Center. He has been president of IPA since 1997.