A 91-year-old Louisiana man with dementia has spent his afternoons rediscovering joy thanks to his visitors: kids from the day care center across the street.
Gene McGeHee is an old man who is afflicted with dementia, a term that covers a range of medical conditions relating to the loss of memory, language, and other thinking abilities, including the most common illness, Alzheimer's disease.
The elderly man with dementia lives in Vidalia, Louisiana, right across a daycare. According to CBS News, McGeHee discovered a group of children from the day care who were "willing and wanting to include him in their fun."
The day care's teacher, Megan Nunez, met the elderly man with dementia and has been meeting him anew every day for the last three years. McGeHee's severe dementia makes him forget they met the previous day, so the two have to be reintroduced. Nunez doesn't mind.
Cathy McGeHee, the daughter of the elderly man with dementia, shared that her father's illness is so severe that he even cannot recognize his own face or identify himself in pictures. According to God Updates, Cathy shared that aside from her father's battle with dementia, he was also struggling with loneliness. While being around children could not cure his dementia, the kindness that the kids showed to the elderly man seemed to have cured his loneliness.
Cathy said that the children "have been such a blessing to Daddy. And he lights up!" She explained that every time her father hears the sounds of kids playing outside, "he just goes right to the front yard," as if remembering that being outside among children was a previous joyful experience to him.
As for the children, they don't mind McGeHee's illness. In telling the children about the elderly man with dementia, Nunez shared, "We always tell the kids that his brain is kind of sick, but his heart remembers us."
McGehee is just one of the 50 million people around the world who are suffering from dementia. According to the World Health Organization, Alzheimer's disease is the most common form of dementia, accounting for about 60% to 70% of cases. In the United States, Alzheimer's disease affects about 5.8 million Americans, 80% of which are aged 75 and above, as per the Alzheimer's Association.
However, there is some good news for those who are at risk for dementia. According to a press release via PR Newswire, new studies have shown how a new blood-based marker test developed by Diadem SRL is effective in determining which patients will likely develop to Alzheimer's disease up to six years before the symptoms even appear.
Called the AlzoSure assey, the simple and non-invasive plasma-based biomarker test can "accurately predict the probability that a patient with asymptomatic mild cognitive impairment (MCI) will progress to Alzheimer's dementia (AD)."
This new patented technology will impact "the development of new drugs for AD, which now will be able to be widely administered early in the disease process, when the chances for slowing and stopping the cognitive ravages of AD are the greatest," Diadem CEO Paul Kinnon said.
