Hi, my grandma was just diagnosed recently with Alzheimer's disease and she is still at the early stages it seems. She can't remember a lot of facts like the county she lives in and things like that but she still recgonizes and knows all of us. I know that this disease progresses at different rates but I was wondering if anyone could tell me or give me an idea of how much time I have before it progresses to the point where she won't even recognize us anymore. Any information you have would be really helpful, even if just from your own experiences.
Thank you!

Sorry to hear about Grandma .... it's always a sad state of affairs.

Nobody can give you specific times of any deterioration, because each human affected is unique before the disease, so they are unique when they are in the disease. The sticky at the beginning of this particular forum "The 7 Stages of Alzheimers" is the best 'average' you will get from anybody. There is another version 'the 3 stages of Dementia' but I have found the 7 Stages to be a bit more thorough.

A lot will depend on your Grandma. Is she stubborn and refusing assistance? If so, she will have more accidents which can speed up the disease process. Is she compliant and happy? Then the disease may just slowly creep up gradually.

Some AD patients continue to recognise family but forget everything else. Others forget family friends and remember everything else. Because we don't know the brain well enough, nobody will really know until it happens.

My best advice is to research and study and educate yourself and BE PREPARED !!!! Things can turn at a moments notice and if your not ready for it, it will physically and mentally hurt you and your family.

Goodluck.

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.

Also, although she was recently diagnosed, she might have been in early stages of the disease for awhile now without it being detected.