It's one of the worst fears we have for our parents or for ourselves: that we, or they, will end up in a nursing home, drugged into a stupor. And that fear is not entirely unreasonable. Almost 300,000 nursing home residents are currently receiving antipsychotic drugs, usually to suppress the anxiety or aggression that can go with Alzheimer's disease and other dementia.
Antipsychotics, however, are approved mainly to treat serious mental illnesses like schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. When it comes to dementia patients, the drugs have a black box warning, saying that they can increase the risk for heart failure, infections and death.
None of this was on Marie Sherman's mind when her family decided that her mother, 73-year-old Beatrice DeLeon, would be better off in a nursing facility near her home in Sonora, Calif. It wasn't because of her Alzheimer's disease, explains Sherman ā it was because her mother had had some falls.
"We didn't want my dad to try to lift her, and we wanted to make sure she was safe," says Sherman.
It wasn't long before the nursing home staff told Manuel DeLeon, Beatrice's husband, that his wife was agitated and they wanted to give her some medication for that. So he said OK.
[For more of this story, written by Ina Jaffe and Robert Benincasa, go to http://www.npr.org/blogs/healt...lem-in-nursing-homes]
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