The use of Piaget's theory in Alzheimer's disease

Abstract

Child-like behaviors of adults with Alzheimer's disease are often puzzling and stressful to caregivers. The possibility of using Piaget's child developmental model to understand these behaviors is explored in this paper. Based on data from recent studies revealing that adults with Alzheimer's disease appear to lose cognitive functions in the reverse order of acquisition in Piaget's theory, the purpose of this paper is to describe how the use of this theory to understand cognitive changes characteristic of AD might enhance caregiving techniques.