It's a sunny autumn afternoon and a good time to make apple crisp at Pathstone Living, a memory care facility and nursing home in Mankato, Minn. Activities staffer Jessica Abbott gathers half a dozen older women at a counter in the dining area, where the soundtrack is mostly music they could have fox-trotted to back in the day.
It seems residents can always find something to do around here. That can help to relieve the agitation common in some people with Alzheimer's or other forms of dementia — agitation that in other nursing homes might be managed with antipsychotic drugs.
Though antipsychotics are approved to treat serious mental illnesses like schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, the FDA says the drugs can increase the risk of death for people with dementia. Still, they're prescribed for nearly 300,000 nursing home residents nationally.
A few years ago, antipsychotics were used frequently at Pathstone, too.
"We saw these as medications that were supposed to help the patient and, of course, we gave them to them with the feeling that we were doing good," says Shelley Matthes, a registered nurse who is head of quality assurance for the nonprofit Ecumen, which runs Pathstone and about a dozen other nursing facilities in Minnesota.
[For more of this story, written by Ina Jaffe, go to http://www.npr.org/blogs/healt...-without-risky-drugs]
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