What is Cognitive Retention Therapy™?

Ask seniors what they worry about the most, and you will often hear the same answers: “Falling and breaking a hip,” “Losing my independence,” and “Being diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease.”

Fortunately, The Senior's Choice members have available to them specific training and resources to help their clients in preventing and dealing with these life-changing events. For Senior’s Choice members caring for Alzheimer's and dementia clients, our exclusive Cognitive Retention Therapy™ program can offer groundbreaking help to clients and their families.

If you have ever tried to remember a piece of information but could not – the “it’s on the tip of my tongue” phenomena – then you have experienced something that a person with Alzheimer’s disease experiences increasingly more every day. In the mild to moderate stages of Alzheimer’s disease, something very similar happens: the information that makes up our memories largely remains intact, while the neural pathways or “bridges” that “connect the dots” and allow us to remember are lost to the disease.

A well-researched type of therapy for early to mid-stage Alzheimer’s clients, Cognitive Retention Therapy™, or “CRT,” uses the way we "break up" our long term memories to great advantage by stimulating and training the process of locating the information that our memories are made of. The structured cognition exercises are usually practiced twice weekly by the client with the help of a CRT counselor. Research shows results at least equivalent to presently available Alzheimer's medications and most importantly, improvements in quality of life indicators were substantial.

The Senior’s Choice member companies are the exclusive senior companion care providers able to offer this type of therapy to their clients. For more information on this groundbreaking therapy, click here to visit the CRT site.