I am concerned about my husband’s mental abilities (79). Sometimes he no longer recognizes acquaintances on the street, has a lot of trouble with his smartphone and asked a granddaughter who has just graduated how her studies were going. The other day he would make coffee; he wondered aloud how to do that again. On the other hand, he solves difficult Sudoku puzzles effortlessly and does not turn his hand around for a long car ride. He also notices that he forgets things. He blames it on the morphine patch he’s been on for two years. He also takes pregabalin; both because of nerve pain. Could that be the cause?
Joris Bartstra, journalist with a medical degree.
Yes, that’s possible. Mental processes of which you give examples all depend on the smooth communication of the nerve cells in the brain. Many medicines affect this. Both morphine and pregabalin are reasonably at the front of the suspect’s bench. This usually does not mean that they make you permanently demented: if you stop taking them, the influence on cognitive functioning is gone. However, people who use large amounts of drugs, alcohol or psychotropic drugs for years are more likely to develop dementia. Alzheimer’s-type dementia usually begins with the inability to store things in short-term memory. If you’re going to introduce yourself to the same person three times at a party, it’s very wrong. But you don’t really give strong examples of that. It’s more that your man doesn’t know how to dig things up at the right time. That is a complex function. As you get older, more and more information enters your memory, while storage space decreases and the process of navigating it slows down. Stopping morphine will probably improve it a bit, but it will return more pain.
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