Clinic, art museum joining to provide art experiences for dementia patients

By Kaye Spector
Plain Dealer Health and Medical Writer

Alzheimer’s disease begins in the brain’s memory center, destroying
cells and causing problems with thinking and behavior. But in the
disease’s early- to midstage, areas of the brain that govern emotion,
perception and creativity often remain intact.
Those undisturbed areas of the brain make it possible for patients to
respond to the visual arts and music, even when they’ve lost
connection to the everyday world.

A symposium today on making the arts accessible to dementia patients
kicks off a new collaboration between two of the town’s venerable
institutions, the Cleveland Museum of Art and the Cleveland Clinic.

One of the workshops: Forty docents from the art museum and the Clinic
will learn to tailor tours to patients with dementia. The Clinic, with
it 3,500-object art collection, has its own curator and docents. It will
offer the special tours beginning this summer; the art museum will offer
its in the next few months.

Clinic physicians will be encouraged to advise their patients — and
their caregivers — to sign up for the tours, said Iva Fattorini,
executive director of the Clinic’s Arts and Medicine Institute. The
tours are patterned after a program at the Museum of Modern Art in New
York City.

“It makes good sense if you think about the neurology of the
disease,” said Dr. Randolph Schiffer, director of the Clinic’s Lou
Ruvo Center for Brain Health in Las Vegas. “Art can be a way to reach
and maintain the healthy areas” of the brain.

Medicine has few treatments to offer Alzheimer’s patients; scientists
have yet to answer basic questions about the disease, including its
cause.

The number of people diagnosed with Alzheimer’s is expected to
skyrocket over the next few decades. Ohioans with the disease will
number some 230,000 this year.

Schiffer, a symposium speaker, said the program highlights a trend
among physicians to approach Alzheimer’s treatment in less of a
medical model way. For example: Schiffer no longer asks his patient to
disrobe.

“I try to talk to them and relate to them and hold on to that sense
of who they are,” he said. “Our task is to help the person hold
themselves together as long as possible and help with transitions.”

There is not a lot of research to prove Alzheimer’s patients respond
to art and music, but Schiffer says he and other physicians have seen
it.

“People are using art as a therapeutic thing, as a healing milieu,”
said Dr. Alan Lerner, director of University Hospital’s Memory and
Cognition Center and neurology professor at Case Western Reserve
University. UH is a co-sponsor of the symposium.

The new collaboration also includes a distance-learning program, in
which Clinic patients — here or in other cities — can “attend”
an art lecture by art museum experts.

“This partnership speaks to the role that visual arts can play beyond
aesthetic enjoyment,” said Dale Hilton of the museum. “Every time we
work with a different audience, we learn so much more about how our
works of art are meaningful to other people.”

Nancy Udelson, executive director of the Alzheimer’s Association
Cleveland area chapter, said patients in the early stages of disease
will benefit most from the art tours.

“People with early-stage disease want to lead happy, fulfilled,
enriched lives,” she said. “Many cannot work, but can do other
things. Their families are looking for things to do together as well.

“It’s exciting to see Cleveland at the forefront of this kind of
programming.”

Nearly 200 docents, caregivers and health care professionals from
across the state signed up for the symposium. Registration is closed.