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    Their Parents Are Giving Money to Scammers. They Can’t Stop Them.

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    One son couldn’t prevent his father from giving about $1 million in savings to con artists, including one posing as a female wrestling star. The two became estranged.When Chris Mancinelli walked into his father’s home for the first time after the 79-year-old man died last summer, he stopped to look at family photos displayed on the refrigerator door. Near a crayon drawing spelling out “grandpa” in rainbow colors were photos of his father’s three granddaughters at a swimming pool.But one image jumped out: a photo of Alexa Bliss, a professional wrestling personality.Mr. Mancinelli’s father, Alfred, was completely smitten with the star — or at least with the con artist impersonating her. He was convinced he was in a romantic relationship with Ms. Bliss, leading him to give up about $1 million in retirement savings (and his granddaughter’s college fund) to the impostor and a varied cast of online fraudsters he interacted with over several years.When Mr. Mancinelli tried to intervene, moving his father’s last $100,000 to a safe account, Alfred sued him — his loyalty was to “Lexi.”“There was nothing we could do to convince him,” said Mr. Mancinelli, 47, a chemical engineer in Collegeville, Pa. An elder care specialist deemed Alfred “really sharp,” he said, but lacking purpose.Mr. Mancinelli and others who have tried to awaken their loved ones from this trance often feel powerless, even after they’ve done everything to shatter the fiction and protect their assets. They say it’s as if their parent had been brainwashed into a cult.In some ways, they were: These victims were slowly groomed by con artists posing as love interests, investment advisers or government officials, among others. Once ensconced inside this bubble, they are unable or unwilling to acknowledge that they have become victims. Even when their own children are warning them of the con.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      How Caregivers for Dementia Patients Manage Mood and Personality Changes

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      Shifts in behavior can be challenging to manage. Experts have five strategies that can help.Susan Hirsch was visiting her father in the hospital where he was recuperating after a fall and was shocked to find him — long devoted to her mother — flirting with a nurse as if he were “17 and in the Navy again,” she said.Ms. Hirsch, a 67-year-old memory care educator from Palmyra, Pa., scolded her father. But the admonishment only enraged the 93-year-old man; she recalled him saying, “in not nice words,” to get out of his room as she scuttled away.More than 11 million adults in the United States are caring for people diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia. In addition to memory loss, most people with dementia will experience mood and behavior changes including aggression, apathy, disorientation, depression, wandering, impulsivity and delusions.Many caregivers describe mood and personality changes as the most upsetting symptoms. While antipsychotic and sedative medications are often used to manage dementia-related mood issues, they have limited efficacy.To get on top of — and feel less toppled by — mood changes, it’s helpful for caregivers to remember that those shifts are caused by changes in the brain, said Dr. Nathaniel Chin, a geriatrician and associate professor in the department of medicine at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.“They’re no one’s fault,” he said, and recognizing this can help you “feel less upset at your loved one.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Francisco Lopera, the ‘Country Doctor’ Who Upended Our Understanding of Dementia

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      Francisco Lopera defied rebels, cartels and vampire bats to become a pioneering researcher of Alzheimer’s disease.In 1978, Dr. Francisco Lopera did what recent medical school graduates in Colombia and much of Latin America have long done: He set out for an obligatory year of work in a remote part of the country, where an inexperienced médico rural might be the only physician for miles. Dr. Lopera, who was born in the Andean region of Antioquia and knew mostly mountains and farm life before medical school, carried out his service in the Darién Gap, on the Caribbean coast near Panama.There Dr. Lopera, a groundbreaking Colombian Alzheimer’s researcher who died this week at age 73, treated stabbings, snakebites, complicated births, burns and fevers in a hospital that had electricity for only half the day. On one occasion, he was kidnapped by Marxist guerrillas. Another time, he had to flee gunshots.When I met Dr. Lopera in 2017, to start research on a book about the families with Alzheimer’s that became his life’s work, he told me a story about two young brothers who had died one after the other in his hospital, of unknown causes. Lopera traveled to the family home in a remote jungle clearing, where he discovered that the boys’ surviving siblings had bites on their fingers from vampire bats. He sent the bodies to a pathology lab hours away by boat, and the pathologists confirmed rabies. When the government brought in a rabies expert to investigate, Dr. Lopera joined him.He left that experience — long nights in the rainforest, searching for hidden roosts, engrossed in the natural history of rabies and bats — wanting to become a rabies epidemiologist. But that was not to be. His interests were eclectic and quick to change, and a few years later he became a neurology resident in Medellín.In 1984, Dr. Lopera examined a farmer in his 40s who appeared to have dementia. Dr. Lopera took again the unusual step of traveling to the family home, in a mountain hamlet like the one where he had been born. Not just the farmer had symptoms of dementia, he saw — a brother also appeared to be affected. Dr. Lopera had discovered what would turn out to be the world’s largest family with early-onset Alzheimer’s disease. The family shared a genetic mutation, later nicknamed the paisa mutation, that was unique to their region of Colombia. Dr. Lopera spent the next four decades studying the family’s 6,000 members.Dr. Francisco Lopera, second from right, in Yarumal, Colombia, in 2010, with Oderis Villegas, center, who was showing signs of Alzheimer’s disease at age 50. A sister, María Elsy, left, had a more advanced case.Todd Heisler/The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Do You Have Healthy Brain Habits? Take This Quiz to Find Out.

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      What can I do to take good care of my brain and lower my risk for a neurological disease? That’s the No. 1 question neurologist Dr. Jonathan Rosand hears from his patients (and their family members) at the Massachusetts General Hospital McCance Center for Brain Health. To help answer it, he and his colleagues, with […] More

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      5 Books to Make Caregiving a Little More Manageable

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      Health care professionals and other experts shared recommendations for anyone providing and receiving care.Tina Sadarangani, a geriatric nurse practitioner in New York City, has spent years working with older adults and their families. She counsels patients on the medications they should take, the eating habits they should change and the specialists they should see.But it wasn’t until her own father became seriously ill — requiring a slew of medications, deliveries, physical therapy and more — that she understood the experience from what she calls “the other side of the table.”Dr. Sadarangani, who has a doctorate in nursing, comes from a family of medical providers. But most of the people who care for loved ones don’t have this expertise.“If it was this complicated for our family,” Dr. Sadarangani said, “how were people with no medical backgrounds doing this every day in America?”Resources like books aren’t a panacea, she said. But they can help validate experiences, offer advice and make us feel less alone. Here are five titles, recommended by health care providers and other experts, to help those who help others.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      A Blood Test Accurately Diagnosed Alzheimer’s 90% of the Time, Study Finds

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      It was much more accurate than primary care doctors using cognitive tests and CT scans. The findings could speed the quest for an affordable and accessible way to diagnose patients with memory problems.Scientists have made another major stride toward the long-sought goal of diagnosing Alzheimer’s disease with a simple blood test. On Sunday, a team of researchers reported that a blood test was significantly more accurate than doctors’ interpretation of cognitive tests and CT scans in signaling the condition.The study, published Sunday in the journal JAMA, found that about 90 percent of the time the blood test correctly identified whether patients with memory problems had Alzheimer’s. Dementia specialists using standard methods that did not include expensive PET scans or invasive spinal taps were accurate 73 percent of the time, while primary care doctors using those methods got it right only 61 percent of the time.“Not too long ago measuring pathology in the brain of a living human was considered just impossible,” said Dr. Jason Karlawish, a co-director of the Penn Memory Center at the University of Pennsylvania who was not involved in the research. “This study adds to the revolution that has occurred in our ability to measure what’s going on in the brain of living humans.”The results, presented Sunday at the Alzheimer’s Association International Conference in Philadelphia, are the latest milestone in the search for affordable and accessible ways to diagnose Alzheimer’s, a disease that afflicts nearly seven million Americans and over 32 million people worldwide. Medical experts say the findings bring the field closer to a day when people might receive routine blood tests for cognitive impairment as part of primary care checkups, similar to the way they receive cholesterol tests.“Now, we screen people with mammograms and PSA or prostate exams and other things to look for very early signs of cancer,” said Dr. Adam Boxer, a neurologist at the University of California, San Francisco, who was not involved in the study. “And I think we’re going to be doing the same thing for Alzheimer’s disease and hopefully other forms of neurodegeneration.”In recent years, several blood tests have been developed for Alzheimer’s. They are currently used mostly to screen participants in clinical trials and by some specialists like Dr. Boxer to help pinpoint if a patient’s dementia is caused by Alzheimer’s or another condition.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Gena Rowlands Has Alzheimer’s Decades After ‘The Notebook’

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      Rowlands, 94, played an older woman with dementia in the 2004 movie directed by her son, Nick Cassavetes.Gena Rowlands has Alzheimer’s disease, a late-life challenge for the Oscar-nominated actor who captivated Hollywood in the 1970s with her performance in “A Woman Under the Influence” and later portrayed a character with dementia in “The Notebook.”Rowlands’s son, Nick Cassavetes, the director of “The Notebook,” revealed the diagnosis in a recent interview with Entertainment Weekly, telling the magazine that she had been living with the disease for five years.“She’s in full dementia,” he said. “And it’s so crazy — we lived it, she acted it, and now it’s on us.”A former theater and television actress, Rowlands, 94, made 10 films across four decades with John Cassavetes, the independent film pioneer who was also her husband. She was nominated for the Academy Award for best actress for two of them: “A Woman Under the Influence” (1974), in which she plays a wife and mother who cracks under the burden of domestic harmony, and “Gloria” (1980), about a woman who helps a young boy escape the mob.When Rowlands received an honorary lifetime achievement Oscar in 2015, Laura Linney praised her as an actor who “smashed and destroyed the female stereotype of her time.”“Her work declares: You want to see a modern woman? Here is a modern woman,” Linney said.In 2004, a new generation of filmgoers came to know Rowlands for her portrayal of the older version of Allie in the romance drama “The Notebook.” (Rachel McAdams played the character in her younger years.)Rowlands’s tearful performance in a pivotal scene moved audiences and critics alike. Jessica Winter of The Village Voice credited Rowlands with “locating the terror and desolation wrought by the cruel betrayals of a failing mind.”In an interview with O magazine published the year “The Notebook” was released, Rowlands said her own mother had experienced Alzheimer’s.“I went through that with my mother, and if Nick hadn’t directed the film, I don’t think I would have gone for it — it’s just too hard,” she said.After “The Notebook,” Rowlands made several more appearances in films and television shows, including in “The Skeleton Key” and the detective series “Monk.” Her last appearance in a feature film was in 2014, when she played a retiree who befriends her gay dance instructor in “Six Dance Lessons in Six Weeks.” More

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      How Your Body and Mind Change in Midlife

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      Midlife, typically defined as ages 40 to 60, is an inflection point. It’s a time when our past behaviors begin to catch up with us and we start to notice our bodies and minds aging — sometimes in frustrating or disconcerting ways. But it’s also an opportunity: What our older years will look and feel […] More

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      Alzheimer’s Takes a Financial Toll Long Before Diagnosis, Study Finds

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      New research shows that people who develop dementia often begin falling behind on bills years earlier.Long before people develop dementia, they often begin falling behind on mortgage payments, credit card bills and other financial obligations, new research shows.A team of economists and medical experts at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and Georgetown University combined Medicare records with data from Equifax, the credit bureau, to study how people’s borrowing behavior changed in the years before and after a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s or a similar disorder.What they found was striking: Credit scores among people who later develop dementia begin falling sharply long before their disease is formally identified. A year before diagnosis, these people were 17.2 percent more likely to be delinquent on their mortgage payments than before the onset of the disease, and 34.3 percent more likely to be delinquent on their credit card bills. The issues start even earlier: The study finds evidence of people falling behind on their debts five years before diagnosis.“The results are striking in both their clarity and their consistency,” said Carole Roan Gresenz, a Georgetown University economist who was one of the study’s authors. Credit scores and delinquencies, she said, “consistently worsen over time as diagnosis approaches, and so it literally mirrors the changes in cognitive decline that we’re observing.”The research adds to a growing body of work documenting what many Alzheimer’s patients and their families already know: Decision-making, including on financial matters, can begin to deteriorate long before a diagnosis is made or even suspected. People who are starting to experience cognitive decline may miss payments, make impulsive purchases or put money into risky investments they would not have considered before the disease.“There’s not just getting forgetful, but our risk tolerance changes,” said Lauren Hersch Nicholas, a professor at the University of Colorado School of Medicine who has studied dementia’s impact on people’s finances. “It might seem suddenly like a good move to move a diversified financial portfolio into some stock that someone recommended.”Tell us about your family’s challenges with money management and Alzheimer’s. More