Treatment
If the symptoms of alcohol dementia are caught early enough, the effects may be reversed. The person must stop drinking and start on a healthy diet, replacing the lost vitamins, including, but not limited to, thiamine. Recovery is more easily achievable for women than men, but in all cases it is necessary that they have the support of family and friends and abstain from alcohol.
There is a case study of a patient who was treated with memantine; the patient was a 71 year old female who was treated with memantine for five weeks, at a dosage of 30 mg/daily to help improve memory and cognitive functioning. After the five week treatment the patient had shown improvement on the Mini-Mental State Examination from 18 to 22 points and her tests on the CERAD (Consortium to Establish a Registry for Alzheimer’s Disease) improved from zero to five on the Wordlist Recall and six to eight on the Drawing test. This is the only study of its kind but has promising outcomes for further research.
Read more about this topic: Alcohol Dementia
Famous quotes containing the word treatment:
“Judge Ginsburg’s selection should be a model—chosen on merit and not ideology, despite some naysaying, with little advance publicity. Her treatment could begin to overturn a terrible precedent: that is, that the most terrifying sentence among the accomplished in America has become, “Honey—the White House is on the phone.””
—Anna Quindlen (b. 1952)
“I feel that any form of so called psychotherapy is strongly contraindicated for addicts.... The question “Why did you start using narcotics in the first place?” should never be asked. It is quite as irrelevant to treatment as it would be to ask a malarial patient why he went to a malarial area.”
—William Burroughs (b. 1914)
“I am glad you agree with me as to the treatment of the mining riots. We shall crush out the lawbreakers if the courts and juries do not fail.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)