Alzheimer’s Aggression

Charlie Powell feels like he lost his dad a long time ago.

His dad, who has Alzheimer’s disease, doesn’t just forget who Powell is—he sometimes becomes violent.

“Once, me and mom disabled his car so that he couldn’t drive it, and he soon realized what we’d done,” Powell, 50, says. “He rushed across the living room and literally growled at me like a bear in the most frightful way. Thirty seconds later, he didn’t know he’d done it, and everything was fine.”

The “bear incident” is just one of many that eventually caused Powell and his family to put their 86-year-old father into a nursing home. “Once, the doctors noticed that mom’s eardrums were both ruptured, and they realized dad probably slapped her upside the head and cupped her ears.”

Unfortunately, Alzheimer’s aggression is fairly common among Alzheimer’s patients. There’s cursing, hitting, grabbing, kicking, pushing, throwing things, scratching, screaming, biting, and making strange noises. More than 4.5 million Americans are diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease every year, and up to half can show some of these behaviors. The number of total Alzheimer’s sufferers is projected to balloon to 16 million by 2050.

Alzheimer’s aggression is one of the main reasons most people put their parents in nursing homes. Fortunately, new medications and coping methods can help, though agitation and aggression are still a misunderstood aspect of Alzheimer’s.

“The public thinks Alzheimer’s is a memory disease,” says Dr. Ramzi Hajjar, a geriatrician at St. Louis University in Missouri. “But, in fact, there are lots of neuropsychiatric symptoms. Alzheimer’s patients often develop delusions. They think their family is stealing things from them, for example. And they get very aggressive and irritable towards their spouse.”

He stresses that families need to always remember that Alzheimer’s aggression really has nothing to do with them. “The child always wants to take it personally, which causes unnecessary anxiety,” Hajjar says.