Beginning

Every patient will progress differently. The average patient is believed to have the disease about 8 years according to many books, but it can range anywhere from 3 to 20 years. Do you know what her MMSE test scores are? The average drop is 2-3 points a year, and a score of 10 is usually where they start to call a patient severely impaired. (My DH had a signficantly larger drop last year, but early onset cases appear to progress faster.)

As you'll see on the boards, a lot can affect how well she does. Illnesses, surgery, changes in living situations or routines, and stress have all been reported as causing faster deterioration (particularly the infamous UTI infection, which people have reported can be disasterous). If she's taking drugs (Aricept, Namenda or their equivalents), her illness may slow. A few years ago a patient using the name of Snowy occasionally posted on this board. Snowy said that she had been diagnosed with AD about ten years previously. Even though the disease was clearly affecting her, she still wrote well enough to give helpful information to others. It's people like Snowy who still seem to function well for years who can give others hope.

Our doctor told us that pneumonia or some other failure/disease of aging is more likely to be a cause of death for an elderly AD patient than AD itself.

Because patients vary so widely, it's hard to get good predictions. Columbia's on-line calculator that predicts time to nursing home and death is somewhat useful, since it compares test scores, age of diagnosis and other information to give you predictions based on the percentiles of other patients in their database.