Johns Hopkins Medicine Dementia Expert: Environmental Changes Sometimes Work as Well as Drugs

Johns Hopkins Medicine Dementia Expert: Environmental Changes Sometimes Work as Well as Drugs

On the same day the U.S. Government Accountability Office issued a report detailing the frequent use of powerful antipsychotic medications to treat elderly patients with dementia, two Johns Hopkins Medicine experts on the disease have published a new study looking at a broad range of techniques for treating patients who are delusional, violent, wandering or experiencing other complications of dementia.

Nationally known dementia experts Prof. Constantine Lyketsos of Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Prof. Laura Gitlin of the Johns Hopkins University School of Nursing, and Prof. Helen Kales of the University of Michigan report in a March 2 paper in The BMJ that altering the patient’s environment and other nondrug interventions can sometimes work as well as antipsychotic medications.

Lyketsos, director of the Memory and Alzheimer’s Treatment Center at Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center, is available to discuss today’s GAO report and the research paper in The BMJ. To arrange an interview, contact Heather Dewar at 410-502-9463 or [email protected].