What's memantine like

[Heffy2ky]

Just been to memory clinic with dad he is currently on aricept but nurse suggested memantine for his aggression is this better than aricept or can he take the two tablets

 

[CollegeGirl]

Hi heffy, just wanted to bump your post up. I'm sure someone more experienced than me will be along soon, but in the meantime, my own experience of my mam with Alzheimer's and aricept or memantine is that she could only tolerate low doses of aricept as it made her vomit so she was moved onto memantine. Dad feels that her aggression has been worse since the move and her dosage of memantine has been reduced, and other medications have been introduced to try to calm her, such as lorazepam (a sedative, I think), and sertraline and mirtazapine (both anti-depressants). Only the lorazepam seems to help, but the doctor refuses to prescribe anything but a very low dosage of this, so dad has to pick and choose when to give mam her tablet according to what is happening on that day, and when he needs her to be a little calmer.

The aggression is very difficult to deal with, unfortunately. It's my understanding that aricept and memantine can be taken together, if this is suitable, so perhaps this will help your dad. I think it's a bit of 'try it and see'.

Good luck.

 

[Pheath]

Just to say yes, it's possible to take both aricept and memantine together as they're for different things. Dad is v advanced now and was given memantine about 3/4 yrs ago for aggression (it's really a mood stabiliser), prior to that he'd just been on aricept for many years. I do hope it helps your dad, certainly for us aggression was by far the hardest aspect of the illness to deal with. I'm not sure in our instance how effective it was alone as he still needed an additional calming med on top of the memantine but if you do a word search on the forum there will be many posts on it (also known as Ebixa).