Alzheimer's
Patients Can Still Feel the Emotion
Long After the Memories Have Vanished
UI study offers good news for caregivers, health care workers
By: John Riehl, September 24, 2014
Long After the Memories Have Vanished
UI study offers good news for caregivers, health care workers
By: John Riehl, September 24, 2014
A new University of Iowa
The
findings of this study are published in the September 2014 issue of the journal
Cognitive and Behavioral Neurology, and can be viewed online for free here.
UI
researchers showed individuals with Alzheimer’s disease clips of sad and happy
movies. The patients experienced sustained states of sadness and happiness
despite not being able to remember the movies.
“This
confirms that the emotional life of an Alzheimer’s patient is alive and well,”
says lead author Edmarie Guzmán-Vélez, a doctoral student in clinical
psychology, a Dean’s Graduate Research Fellow, and a National Science
Foundation Graduate Research Fellow.
Guzmán-Vélez
conducted the study with Daniel Tranel, UI professor of neurology and
psychology, and Justin Feinstein, assistant professor at the University of Tulsa
Tranel
and Feinstein published a paper in 2010 that predicted the importance of
attending to the emotional needs of people with Alzheimer’s, which is expected
to affect as many as 16 million people in the United States
“It’s
extremely important to see data that support our previous prediction,” Tranel
says. “Edmarie’s research has immediate implications for how we treat patients
and how we teach caregivers.”
Despite
the considerable amount of research aimed at finding new treatments for
Alzheimer’s, no drug has succeeded at either preventing or substantially
influencing the disease’s progression. Against this foreboding backdrop, the
results of this study highlight the need to develop new caregiving techniques
aimed at improving the well-being and minimizing the suffering for the millions
of individuals afflicted with Alzheimer’s.
For
this behavioral study, Guzmán-Vélez and her colleagues invited 17 patients with
Alzheimer’s disease and 17 healthy comparison participants to view 20 minutes
of sad and then happy movies. These movie clips triggered the expected emotion:
sorrow and tears during the sad films and laughter during the happy ones.
About
five minutes after watching the movies, the researchers gave participants a
memory test to see if they could recall what they had just seen. As expected,
the patients with Alzheimer’s disease retained significantly less information
about both the sad and happy films than the healthy people. In fact, four
patients were unable to recall any factual information about the films, and one
patient didn’t even remember watching any movies.
Before
and after seeing the films, participants answered questions to gauge their
feelings. Patients with Alzheimer’s disease reported elevated levels of either
sadness or happiness for up to 30 minutes after viewing the films despite
having little or no recollection of the movies.
Quite
strikingly, the less the patients remembered about the films, the longer their
sadness lasted. While sadness tended to last a little longer than happiness,
both emotions far outlasted the memory of the films.
The
fact that forgotten events can continue to exert a profound influence on a
patient’s emotional life highlights the need for caregivers to avoid causing
negative feelings and to try to induce positive feelings.
“Our
findings should empower caregivers by showing them that their actions toward
patients really do matter,” says Guzmán-Vélez, who was a Summer Research
Opportunities Program student in 2008. “Frequent visits and social
interactions, exercise, music, dance, jokes, and serving patients their
favorite foods are all simple things that can have a lasting emotional impact
on a patient’s quality of life and subjective well-being.”
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