By Terri Cunliffe| January 12, 2016

What a better way to start 2016 than with a story of hope.

Mae is a resident living with the effects of moderate stage Alzheimer’s at one of our Covenant Retirement Communities. She lives in her own world, rarely communicating with others. But we’ve seen changes in Mae since she started participating in SAIDO Learning™, a drug-free method used to help improve the symptoms of Alzheimer’s and other dementia diseases.

Saido Learning involves working at simple tasks.

SAIDO Learning is new to Covenant Retirement Communities and while it is not a cure, it allows us for the first time to do more than just care for residents living with dementia; it allows us to improve the symptoms of the disease without the use of drugs and set goals for improvement. This is the first program that directly benefits the person and not just the staff or the environment in which they live.

Mae’s improvements speak for themselves. She has become more attentive and now forms simple three-word sentences. More importantly, Mae is making connections with people and activities in the world around her, not just in her own closed world.

Alzheimer’s disease and dementia together are the sixth leading cause of death in the United States. An estimated 5.5 million older adults diagnosed have been diagnosed. SAIDO Learning is relatively new to the United States but it has been practiced in Japan over the past 14 years and in 1,700 nursing centers.

The empirical results are impressive. Those participating in SAIDO Learning are more engaged in activities; they socialize more with family members and caregivers; and they are generally more optimistic.

How does SAIDO work?
Walk into a SAIDO room at any of our communities and you’ll find one or two participants, called ‘learners’ at a table working with one ‘supporter,’ who is a SAIDO trained CRC staff or family member. One supporter engages up to two learners at a time in 30-minute exercises in simple math, reading aloud, writing and directed dialogue five days a week.

Simple is the key word here. People are surprised to learn that it’s the simple exercises, as opposed to completing a challenging New York Times crossword puzzle, that stimulate the prefrontal cortex of the brain, which is where dysfunction occurs with most people who have dementia.

The object is for learners to master basic material and then move on to new material at their own level and pace. This leads to increased confidence and renewed interest in trying new things.

Seeing Success in the Data
Our Covenant Shores, Mercer Island, Wash., community served as CRC’s SAIDO pilot program in 2014. Twenty of Covenant Shores’ Health Center and Reflections Memory Support residents participated in the program and experienced substantial improvement. The community determined that residents who participated in SAIDO Learning for one year had improved their MMSE (mini-mental state examination) score by an average of 4.4 percent.

While 4.4 percent might not seem like a huge increase to the average person, national studies indicate persons with dementia who do not participate in therapeutic programs experience an average annual decrease of 33 percent in their MMSE scores. The difference in scores represents a significant improvement in the quality of life for our residents.

Seeing Success in the Stories
Some of our communities are only six months into the program and don’t yet have the empirical evidence to support the program’s effectiveness, but the stories we hear from the field tell us SAIDO is working.

One participant’s wife commented her husband is less forgetful since he began