What would happen if a mentally healthy person started taking Alzheimers medications?

I imagine that you would definitely notice. However the drugs for alzheimer’s can’t stop the disease all together, it simply slows it down so if you were perfectly healthy and your doctor was into over medicating (like most seem to be lately) you’d have crazy side effects with not a whole lot of improvement.

Just as a side note, an Alzheimer’s diagnosis can’t actually be confirmed until the person has died because it includes a dissection of their brain

I’m wondering if you are commenting on old information. The drug treatments I see on the Alzheimer’s page are not described as powerful mind altering. The side effects seem to be various types of indigestion.

@sevenfourteen If you were perfectly healthy there wouldn’t be anything to improve.
@YARNLADY My mother overdosed on Nemenda (sp). She had been taking two Aricipt a day, and a family member wanted to try this new drug, Nemenda. Since this was a new drug she was only to take it once a day for two weeks, then gradually work her way up to two a day. However, instead of controlling Mom’s meds, the family member just handed her this new bottle of pills and told her to take only one a day. Mom immediately forgot, or it didn’t register, and she took two. That night she was literally on the floor screaming from hallucinations, in terror of the shadows of things on the wall. She would catch her reflection in the mirror and be very scared because she didn’t know who that “other person” was. The next day the same relative just took the new drug away, handed her back her old, and gradually all of those horrors receded…to a certain extent. She was never free from them again until the day she died. They came on instantly, immediately on the heels of her taking the second pill that she shouldn’t have taken. At one point, after she had to move to an assisted living place after that incident, she inadvertently didn’t get her meds for a week, and her mind REALLY started clearing up. Then someone caught it, put her back on the meds, and the illusions and hallucinations fired up again. That’s a little more than indigestion, IMO.

I once accidently took my dogs Rimadyl for arthritis, I don’t know if my joints felt better or not. lol

@Val123 If you were perfectly healthy you wouldn’t even be at the doctors. I was taking it from the perspective of if you were a healthy older adult in which case it’s perfectly normal to have some memory loss (and I really stress the some because although being forgetful doesn’t naturally come with aging the “use it or lose it” rule does)

@sevenfourteen That’s part of my point. An older family member starts having normal memory loss because of their age, and someone freaks out, convinced that they have Alz. instead of normal memory loss, gets a doctor to “confirm” it and start them on the meds….

Val, there are a couple issues here that I think would be helpful to clarify before I try to answer your question from a scientific standpoint.

1. Are you talking about Alzheimer’s drugs in general, or specifically the one your mother had a bad reaction to? Most AD drugs are acetylcholinesterase inhibitors; the one you’re talking about (Memantine, brand name Namenda) is an NMDA antagonist.

2. Are you asking what the effects of these drugs would be on normal, healthy people, or are you asking if AD is inadvertently overdiagnosed?

I ask question 2 because the way I am reading your question it sounds like this: AD is overdiagnosed. People falsely diagnosed with AD are getting AD medications. I am assuming these medications harm them. Is there justification for this?

That is a very different question from: could people without AD benefit from AD drugs, or do they cause side-effects in healthy people that are not seen in AD patients?

I don’t know about the other drugs but when Aricept was first introduced, a cousin of mine was working as a social worker at a geriatric psych hospital. She said that many of the psychiatrists were taking Aricept when they had to do a presentation!

@nikipedia Thanks for helping me clarify, except I don’t know what “cetylcholinesterase inhibitors” or “NMDA antagonist” means.

But otherwise, the best answer would be that I’m asking, if a healthy person began taking the meds would they cause mental side effects? Secondary to that, from my experience, I wonder if many of the “symptoms” we see that we attribute to the disease can actually be attributed to the meds.

My only justification is seeing the immediate side effects that the meds had on my mother, not only from the time she was accidentally overdosed, but from when she started taking the meds in the first place. We’re talking, within 24 hours of beginning the medications and/or changing the medications. Immediately after starting them for the first time she lost interest in doing everything she used to do. She used to love to sew and read, but within a week of originally starting the meds she could no longer focus on either.

Is that any clearer…or just as muddy?

I can speak only from personal experience. My mother (95) has clear and unambiguous senile dementia. That means no memory of something that was said or done 30 seconds ago. She can remember the color of a dress she wore when she was 17, however.

Her doctor has her on 10 mg. Aricept/ daily and says that it should be taken on faith. It only moderately slows down the inevitable deterioration. There is no way of telling whether it is working or not without taking my mother off it. She has exhibited no side effects of any kind.

But she evinces none of the other symptoms of Alzheimer’s – anger, bad hygiene, not recognizing her family and the staff where she lives, not being able to dress herself and put on some make-up, roaming around inappropriately.

My sis and I give her a lot of support; post-it notes, calls to remind her when to shower and shampoo, all her paper and financial work, all the liaisons with the medical professions. But we live close by.

Yeah, that’s clearer. Let me answer two ways.

1. So like I said above, most AD drugs are acetylcholinesterase inhibitors. Acetylcholine is a chemical found in the brain that’s important for learning and memory, and chemicals that end in -ase are almost always enzymes that degrade the thing in the first part of the name. So acetylcholine + (ester)ase = something that breaks down acetylcholine. An acetylcholinesterase gets rid of acetylcholine.

If you were a scientist and you wanted to figure out how to improve learning and memory, you might think, gee, since acetylcholine is important for learning and memory, if we could only stop acetylcholinesterase from breaking it down, maybe learning and memory would improve!

And that’s what an acetylcholinesterase inhibitor does. It stops acetylcholine from being broken down, and it looks like doing that can help learning and memory. That’s at least how scientists think it helps AD patients.

A few small studies have been done looking at how these drugs affect normal, healthy people. In one study, pilots who were older but not demented performed significantly better on tasks related to aviation when they took donepezil (Aricept), the most common AD medication (from the journal Neurology).

As far as I know, there is no evidence showing that these drugs induce AD or AD-like symptoms, and I cannot think of a plausible biological mechanism for that to happen, either.

2. The AD drug that you mentioned, Memantine (Namenda) works on a different system in the brain, the glutamate system. Glutamate is a hugely important neurotransmitter and is involved in nearly every circuit in your brain.

In order for glutamate molecules to do anything, they need to bind to a receptor. There are two types of receptors that glutamate can bind to: AMPA and NMDA.

This drug, Memantine, binds to NMDA receptors. This makes it harder for glutamate to act on the receptor, since something else (the drug) is in the way*. As you can probably guess, since glutamate acts all over the brain, the drug does too. So it has the potential for some very wide-spread side effects.

However, at the right dose, studies have shown that Memantine is reasonably well tolerated (Neuropharmacology). It’s only when you take really high doses that the side effects start to get really nutty. And that’s exactly what you saw with your mom.

After a quick search I couldn’t find any articles that look specifically at cognitive effects of Memantine on normal, healthy people. So I’ll have to just take a stab in the dark. I don’t see any reason why it would act differently in normal, healthy people vs AD patients. At low doses there are probably some but minimal side effects, and at high doses you probably go pretty nuts.

Since this is way too long already, I will stop here. But I want to reiterate what @sevenfourteen said above: AD diagnosis can’t be made until after death. The diagnostic criteria are based on specific biological markers. If you are worried that it is being overdiagnosed, definitely read up on how the diagnosis is made—I think you will be surprised.

Whew. Sorry. Hope the answer you were looking for is in there somewhere.

*this is a really oversimplified version of what actually happens at the receptor. If you’re interested I can explain more about what really happens—it’s not complicated, just takes a lot of steps to explain.

@nikipedia I actually read all that, and understood about 90%. No, no. No need for further explanation (OK. Inside I’m going ”NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!! Don’t talk anymore!!! Not right now, at least. Wait till tomorrow :). I just need to think….my heart breaks to this day from not knowing what really was happening….

Can you send me to a link that explains the diagnostic criteria?

Thank you so much for your answers…..

@val123 You asked the question….Niki gave you good info. My mom is 91 and has had difficulty but is not taking meds. I know it is heartbreaking. But knowledge is power.

Hang in there.

My Mom thinks there are people with pumps throwing water on her property and now she thinks they are playin hymns. she has tinnitus as well.

@jazmina88 Nick gave great information. My mom was only 68. She died when she was only 74. See…since your mom isn’t taking meds you can know for sure that her delusions are really in her, and not being caused by the medications…..I’ll never, ever know.

@jazmina88 (Sometimes it’s actually fun and funny to talk with them isn’t it! Like, I mentioned Dad once, and she said, “Oh, wasn’t he your father? That guy I didn’t like very well?”—They were married 24 years. I said, “Well, you always TOLD us he was our father!”....and she got the joke and laughed. So did I. :)

Whenever my mother says she is ready to die and would like to go to sleep and not wake up, I offer to push her off a bridge. She can still laugh at that.

And one advantage of memory loss is that I can bring her the same book from the library. She has no idea that she has already read it.

@jazmina88: You might be doing your mother a kindness by discussing her delusions with a gerotological specialist.

@Val123: This link from the Mayo Clinic is pretty thorough and straightforward. I like what wikipedia has to say on it too.

edit; gerontological

My mom doesn’t have Alzheimer’s and is taking Alzheimer’s medications. I keep telling her she doesn’t have Alzheimer’s but she doesn’t believe me. She’s fine.

@Rarebear: Who prescribed the medication for her and why? What med is it? Should you not be talking with her physician?

@gailcalled Her doctor did. No, it’s between her and her doctor. I don’t get involved with her medical care. I give her the information as I see it and she makes her own decisions.

huh….we keep on thinkin it’s her ears and the ringing…....I know she’s nutty….but maybe it is delusions….Her fence, being a foot off and the fact, she got a letter saying she cant go on the other side drives her nuts.

@Rarebear You never told me this!! How long has she been taking it, and have you noticed any changes? This is a classic example of the damn brainwashing the big pharma’s are doing to us. All old people have or will have Alzheimers. And the older generation seems more ready to suck into the miracle drug thing with no questions.

@nikipedia Thanks. I’ll go look.

I was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s by a General Practitioner and had me totally convinced, that is what I have. I was given a script for Aricept and after a few months I began getting extremely disorientated, and falling down all the time. I had absolutely no control of my falling, I’d go straight down into or onto whatever was there,or no matter where. So I explained this to the doctor and put on Namenda which I continued to fall like with other medication only this time, I DIDN’T EVEN KNOW I WAS FALLING, I was totally blacking out. Later on I kept taking these meds (doctor’s orders) he said side effects will go away. Now I was really convinced I had Alzheimer’s. Then I started hallucinating, I even called the police to get these people out of my house, not once but twice. My next step was what is there to live for, I attempted suicide twice and you know where you end then. I am 63, this doctor had convinced me to this point of indifference. This happened over a year ago, I still can not think properly but it’s getting better. When stopped these meds. I could barely speak. Now I waiting to be able to fix my car, I don’t have the confidence which is pretty crazy cause I was a mechanic most of my life. I also went to two different Neurologist and the told I not have any form of dementia or Alzheimer’s 4 months after I stopped those meds. These medications should never be taking casually, they really do a job to your brain. Only go to a Neurologist who is trained in area. As you get older physical parts of your body wear out, the last I wanted to lose is my memories.