Alzheimer’s disease would affect up to 9,000 people in Corsica. Anne-Marie Raffalli, was diagnosed in 2021 and agreed to surrender to France 3 Corse ViaStella.
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“A heavy sentence”. In 2021, Anne-Marie Raffalli is not yet 70 years old. In an office of the memory resources and research center, in Bastia, “[s]“a neurologist” tells her that she has Alzheimer’s disease. “We didn’t expect it at all. I thought someone was going to tell me: “It’s depression,” she says.
The island does not have consolidated figures for people suffering from this disease or being monitored for cognitive decline. The regional health agency counted, as of December 31, 2022, 2,938 people affected, while the France Alzheimer Foundation puts the figure at 9,000. Nationwide, 900,000 people are diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease or another related illness.
The main cause of dementia, this neurological condition results from a slow degeneration of neurons. It begins in the hippocampus and then spreads to the rest of the brain. It is characterized by disorders of recent memory, executive functions and orientation in time and space. “I was losing words, it was starting to come out. My friends noticed it and didn’t dare tell me”, explains Anne-Marie Raffalli.
-Psychologist at the memory resources and research center, Florent Salducci explains: “As the degradation progresses, it will affect cognitive functions other than language or memory. This will concern what we call instrumental functions, that is to say the capacities of visual perception, the motor capacities, but also the capacities to organize, to plan actions. The person will no longer remember if they took their treatment, if they ate.”
“Worthy” until the end of the appointment, once out of the hospital structure, Anne-Marie Raffalli and her husband go for a walk on the beach “to resume [leur] breath”. “We had to accept the diagnosis,” breathes the septuagenarian.
In their house in Castello-di-Rustino, many paintings hang on the walls. Reproductions of great masters: Van Gogh, Monet. Sketches that Anne-Marie Raffalli has been making for three years in the painting workshop that she follows at the memory resources and research center. “We do it with an artist who gives us confidence. I had never painted in my life, I hated it. And little by little, I entered another world. Now I reproduce paintings even though I didn’t know how to hold a brush at all.”
The activity allows people suffering from the disease to concentrate and free themselves, during the workshop, from their daily lives. A daily life particularly marked, in the case of Anne-Marie Raffalli, by her treatment and regular speech therapy sessions. “The painting, the speech therapist, the memory center… It’s all linked. There is an improvement in my behavior, otherwise it would have deteriorated much more quickly”, she smiles.
This testimony can be found, this Friday, January 24 at 8:40 p.m., on France 3 Corse ViaStella in a new issue of Sucetà magazine dedicated to Alzheimer’s disease.
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