T: As you should know, Alzheimer’s disease is the most common neurodegenerative pathology. What do you think should first be done if Alzheimer’s is suspected?

OT: Early diagnosis, adapted and personalized care aim to preserve the patient’s autonomy, and also to support caregivers or significant others.

T: Any idea on the number of patients and the frequency of this pathology in France?

N: I guess more than 900,000 people, with the pathology increasing with age, affecting 3% of people over 65 and more than 20% of those over 80, and women twice as often as men.

OT: And it’s the most common major neurocognitive disorder of the elderly, about 70% of cases, which makes it ahead of vascular dementia.

T: What do you know about the clinical signs?

OT: Clinical signs manifest in cognitive and executive disorders, resulting in memory disturbances, difficulty organizing thought, reasoning and task execution, gradually leading to a loss of autonomy.

N: And it is also associated with mood and behavioral disorders, aphasia, apraxia, agnosia and spatio-temporal disorientation.

T: Can I now ask you what the risk factors consist in?

N: Alzheimer’s disease is a complex, multifactorial patho logy. Age is the main risk factor, but other factors inte ract, such as socio-cultural ones like the low level of education, or environmental factors like alcohol consumption and smoking, or certain cardiovascular risk factors and unbalanced type 2 diabetes.

OT: Moreover, the absence of physical activity would be associated with an increased frequency of the occurrence of the disease, and cranial microtrauma could be a risk factor. Also, certain genetic determinants would explain a family predisposition to this pathology.

T: What about the impact on family caregivers?

N: Being a family caregiver is a heavy physical and psychological burden, recognized as a risk factor for depression, lack of resistance to infections and even premature death.

T: And now as concerning care and support?

OT: The treatment is based on multidisciplinary care that includes neurologists, psychiatrists, geriatricians, speech therapists, OTs, physiotherapists, psycho-motor therapists, psychologists, nurses, care assistants, and home support workers, and is aimed at preserving the patient’s autonomy and well-being as long as possible.

T: Exactly. And a non-drug intervention is personalized and integrated into the person’s life course, such as adap ted physical activity, art, music or dance-based therapies, gardening, animal-assisted interventions, cognitive or multisensory stimulation measures that help stimulate attention, executive functions, motor functions, especially fine motor skills (like art therapy), improve balance and spatial orientation (dance therapy), temporal orientation and skills mobilization (hortitherapy), promote emotions, stimulate language, improve verbal and non-verbal communication, trigger autobiographical memories and improve the patient’s mood.