3 tips to boost patients’ memory every day, according to this specialist caregiver

HEALTH – How can we support people affected by Alzheimer’s on a daily basis? This Saturday, September 21, marks World Day for the Fight Against this Neurodegenerative Disease, which affects around one million people in France. And even though Alzheimer’s is now a better-known and better-treated disorder, many patients’ loved ones feel helpless or lost when the first clinical symptoms appear, starting with immediate memory disorders.

It is to provide them with help and daily support that Lisa Lopez created her TikTok account two years ago, which is now followed by nearly 63,000 subscribers. The thirty-year-old, who works as a medical-psychological assistant in an Alzheimer’s protected living unit, gives her practical advice to help patients and their loved ones. Among the topics addressed by Lisa Lopez in her videos, memory loss, which can disconcert families. How do you react when faced with a parent or friend who is increasingly forgetting recent events? And how can you help them stimulate this memory to slow the progression of the disease? Lisa Lopez gives 3 tips for using it in patients with Alzheimer’s or a related disease.

Read books to exercise your memory

Many scientific studies have already demonstrated the benefits of intellectual activities in reducing the risk of dementia. Even in patients already affected by Alzheimer’s disease, these activities, such as reading, are recommended.

Lisa Lopez therefore advises to “reading books, that is, listening to a story from beginning to end”. Even if reading is neither a cure nor a treatment for Alzheimer’s disease, it helps stimulate memory and promote concentration. The caregiver specifies that it is not necessarily up to the patient to read: he can very well listen to a story that is told to him, that works too.

Reading the newspaper as a daily exercise

For people with dementia, reading a book from cover to cover is not always easy. Because they offer shorter and therefore more accessible content, newspapers and magazines can also be used as a medium to train memory. When patients are placed in a unit, caregivers can participate in this activity by reading them one or two articles. And if the person is still at home, “A small subscription to a newspaper is really practical. It allows you to have a newspaper every day at home.”explains Lisa Lopez.

Listening to music to revive memories

The specialist’s final recommendation: call upon the invoking power of music. “For me, that’s really the best advice: sing, hum.” “Of course, music brings back a memory, a moment in your life, and it allows you to talk to the person about that moment.”

In general, Lisa Lopez recommends listening to music to exercise the memory of Alzheimer’s patients, who will “to be able to sometimes remember sentences, little snippets of words” and thus evoke memories with their loved ones.

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