My Mom is somewhere in Stage 6. Her speech has been affected for a couple of years now. Always using the wrong nouns (e.g. bucket for wheelchair), searching for words, babbling with little sense. However, I have always been able to interpert what she was saying. Her sentences were a little mixed up but there was always a story in there that I could follow. In the past couple of weeks her speech has gotten worse. Its all gibberish. I can't figure out what she might be referring to. There is no hint to what she is expressing to me.

At first, I thought it was because she was started on Seroquel aboutthe same time as the gibberish. She was also very, very, very sleepy; difficult to arouse. Her Seroquel was since decreased. She is mow alert and content, which is good news, but the gibberish is still present. I think it might just be the progression of the disease.

If your LO spoke in gibberish, how long was it before they could not speak? How gradual was it? My Mom has always had the gift of the gab. I can't imagine her not knowing how to speak. Heartbreaking.

Thanks,
marie

Marie,

I don't have any experience in this up till this point. My mom has also always had the gift of gab, so I can relate to your story a bit. Mom is not nearly as talkative as she used to be. I think it's difficult for her to form concrete thoughts and express them, but she is understandable when she does.

Hopefully, someone else will have gone down your road and can respond with better information.

Hugs!

My father is in almost identical shape with a very similar history. His first symptoms had to do with speech (couldn't locate proper names, then nouns). Considerably later, he's in late Stage 6 and much of his speech now consists of word-like sounds rather than words. He's still trying to convey meaning but I have to follow his cadences and tone, and there's a lot of guesswork involved. Sometimes I get it right, sometimes I don't.

He's on Seroquel (25mg/day) and that sometimes makes him more drowsy and (even) less coherent, but the speech issues were there before and I suspect in our case too that it's disease progression, not the drug primarily.

To give you a sense of our timing, his first speech problems became apparent in 2001-2002. He didn't show real cognitive symptoms 'til the end of 2003, and his Alzheimer's wasn't fully evident 'til late 2006. His incoherence and his inability to generate words has only come in this year.

It's really difficult to talk about timing because there's so much variation among individual cases. The best and most detailed description of Alzheimer's staging I've read is here:

http://www.alzinfo.org/clinica...zheimers-disease.asp

According to this, the deterioration of speech marks late Stage 6, and the loss of all but a few words is the gateway into Stage 7. The total mean duration of Stage 6 is given as "approximately 2.3 years." Stage 7a is put at 1 year, and Stage 7b at 1.5 years.

Again, these are just aggregate figures and they don't predict what will happen in an individual case.

I get the sense - but it's only a sense - that in my father's case, he'll lose the ability to speak about a year or a year and a half from now, and after that he might survive two additional years.

Again, I really have nothing to base that on. It's just an impression.

Nevertheless, I hope our experience gives you something to work with.


Best,
Alan

There are two drugs I am aware of, possibly three, that are in stage two clinical trials.

These, so far, show the potential to HALT the disease and even recover lost memories while regaining motor and speech control.

I am not where I can link them, but two of them are scheduled for 2012 release dates to the public, if they survive the trials.

All look promising. Please PM me and I will get you details. Some are still accepting applicants for the trials. These could be the beginning of the end of AZ, and I am hoping they will save dad in law.

If I remember tomorrow, (we are in process of moving), I will dig up the links.

There is hope, and possibly soon enough to save many. I hope those include your loved ones.

Wow, for us, 2012 is a long way away. Does it matter which stage you've progressed to when starting the drugs?

My FIL also had the symptom of speaking gibberish, that is he spoke words but they didn't make sense together, and you could sometimes tell by his body language what he meant. I know every case is different, but his talking gradually tailed off over a period of a few months after that and then it was only a few more months until the end. He died in May 1994. Looking back now I realize the worst course of his disease was relatively short compared to what it might have been. That was a blessing although we didn't realize it at the time.

Hello, Marie!

My MIL passed away just this afternoon, after a 4-year battle. I'm still poking around the message boards and thought I could share some of my/our similar experiences with speech.

There is a lot of speculation as to time-frames between stages, and I think that our 4-year stint of 1 through 7 didn't fall anywhere in those guidelines. At any rate, we noticed she was forgetting names and forgetting faces (who are you again?) about 2 1/2 years ago. We went through having to keep reminding her of who we were(her Son and me - her Son-in-law/caregiver, who both live with her). This was also associated with hallucinations - seeing people that she couldn't describe or didn't know, sitting in the dining room, etc. The hallucinations progressed over the years to the point we finally covered her dresser mirrors in her room to keep from "yelling" at the people she saw.

When she would "get going" in one of her ranting tirades, words would come out that just made no sense - almost like picking random words out of a dictionary. In recent months, she would actually carry on conversations about how the "peanut-butter came yesterday along with a package of pictures that the girl flew flower you know".

Of course, it's hard to make sense of any of it, but at least she was coherent. Over the past month, we saw a drastic decline through stage 6 and right up to the end. Actual words were being replaced more and more with word-sounds/groans/noises. Oddly enough, just feeding her the other night, she wasn't speaking coherently, but when asked if she was still hungry, she said, "No thank you", or "What was that, Chandler?" (her great-grandson's name, who wasn't in the room).

So, even in the midst of the gibberish, we still noticed occasional concrete sentences.

I'm not sure I can give a time-frame, as ours was rather short. But, it was certainly noticed going from forgetting names, random words, random + some gibberish, gibberish + some words, to mostly gibberish with occasional simple sentences.

At any rate, I'll visit back again when things settle down at my end. Until then, take care and best wishes!

Always my best,

Chris