Eating Behavior and Environments of Severe Alzheimer’s Disease Patients With Loss of Language Skills

Background: As Alzheimer’s disease (AD) progresses, AD patients become more and more dependent on the environment. To prevent the patients from being distracted from eating, it is necessary to pay attention to the environment. Purpose: Five severe AD patients with loss of language skills were observed closely to identify the environments that interfered with their eating behaviors and environments that encouraged them to eat. Methods: The author, a certified care worker, recorded the behaviors of five severe AD patients while providing care for the overall aspects of their daily lives. From these records, the author extracted the situations in which the subjects exhibited self-eating behavior and situations in which they were distracted from eating, and organized the meanings of these environments for the subjects. Results: Eating behavior was interrupted: (1) when staff members started conversations nearby a subject, or when a caregiver attempted to stop a subject’s behavior in order to get her to eat; (2) by physical environmental changes, such as phone ringing and reflection of artificial light on their table. Conclusion: By organizing the meanings of the environments surrounding each individual, we can identify the environments that encourage a patient to start eating and environments that interfere with a patient’s eating behavior.