Claire Dinneen’s daughters thought that worsening dementia was causing her growing confusion, but her doctor suspected something else.
Dr. Pei Chen asked them to round up medicines in the 89-year-old woman’s home and they returned with a huge haul. There were 28 drugs ordered by various doctors for various ailments, plus over-the-counter medicines. Chen spent a year sorting out which ones were truly needed and trimmed a dozen.
To her daughters’ surprise, Dinneen got better, able to remember more things and to offer advice on what to wear and how to raise their kids. Her symptoms were from “medication fog,” not her dementia getting worse, Chen told one daughter.
“I was just stunned,” Debbie Dinneen said. “No one had taken a look at the big picture” to see if medicines might be addling her mom, who lives near Berkeley, California.
“Unfortunately, it’s not unusual,” said Chen, a geriatrician at the University of California, San Francisco.