Memantine?

[willbstanton]

My 94 year old Mum has been diagnosed with Lewy bodies dementia.She has difficulty communicating at all, her short term memory is pretty much non existant and she is prone to hallucinations and lives in a bit of a fantasy world where she is going to visit her long since passed away mother.
Major problem is her nocturnal nature now where she will not go to bed and can be very active and agitated at night.
Her legs are blown up and she has abscesses which don't seem to be healing.
The care home called the community mental health team at one point when she was particularly difficult and they prescribed Memantine 20mg daily.
She had previously started on trazadone50mg/5ml with 5ml to be taken each evening.
She resists any meds and so the home have authority to administer covertly but my concern is that there appears to be no monitoring of how effective the Memantine is?
I do not live in the UK and only visit about once every couple of months from Australia.
The CMHT appear to not be monitoring at all and the care home appears to be leaving meds to the CMHT and/or doctor who is also not monitoring.
How to ensure that the Memantine is not making the dementia worse?
Mum went into hospital earlier in the year having reacted badly to a dementia medication.
is there some specific monitoring to see if it is helping or not?
If not why take it???

 

[chick1962]

My 94 year old Mum has been diagnosed with Lewy bodies dementia.She has difficulty communicating at all, her short term memory is pretty much non existant and she is prone to hallucinations and lives in a bit of a fantasy world where she is going to visit her long since passed away mother.
Major problem is her nocturnal nature now where she will not go to bed and can be very active and agitated at night.
Her legs are blown up and she has abscesses which don't seem to be healing.
The care home called the community mental health team at one point when she was particularly difficult and they prescribed Memantine 20mg daily.
She had previously started on trazadone50mg/5ml with 5ml to be taken each evening.
She resists any meds and so the home have authority to administer covertly but my concern is that there appears to be no monitoring of how effective the Memantine is?
I do not live in the UK and only visit about once every couple of months from Australia.
The CMHT appear to not be monitoring at all and the care home appears to be leaving meds to the CMHT and/or doctor who is also not monitoring.
How to ensure that the Memantine is not making the dementia worse?
Mum went into hospital earlier in the year having reacted badly to a dementia medication.
is there some specific monitoring to see if it is helping or not?
If not why take it???

hello and welcome, my husband was on Memantine for 18 month but due to Mental tests every 6 month, they found out it was not effective and changed it to Rivastigmine. The transformation was enormous and his scores went up. I found that Memantine made my husband very slow and sleepy, he was on 40 mg! As he did not have aggressive behaviour or hallucinations or real confusing, I was glad it was changed. Your circumstances are very different to mine so maybe a chat with the Consultant or Mental Health would help? I am sure more ppl on here will follow with advice.

 

[alwaysfretting]

My mum is on memantine and the monitoring has been considerable and quite strict. Cmhn visits very regularly, bp is checked, and at the beginning we had a side effects log to keep. Mme is done regularly and comparisons made. Mum is just about to go onto the max dose which I believe is 20 mg.