- Understanding Behavior in Huntington's Disease Ron Risley, MD 01June2002
- Behavior defies simple analysis
- Perception is limited: the brain fills in the majority of details to give the sense of a complete world
- The missing details are inferred from a complex mix of resources
- Experience
- Memory
- Internal Experience
- Hard Wiring
- Behavior defaults to the hard wired survival skills
- Feeding, Fleeing, Fighting, and Mating
- HD stresses the perceptual fill algorithm
- Direct damage to the brain
- Stressed family dynamics
- Declining function and independence
- Social isolation
- Poor prognosis
- When perceptual processing fails, behavior tends toward fundamentals
- Minimizing psychosocial stress involves focus on overlearned situations
- Familiarity
- Organization
- Routine
- Connections
- Expectations
- Stress is contagious!
- Minimizing physiologic stress = taking care of brain and body
- No tobacco, alcohol, amphetamines
- Healthy diet and Ω–3 fatty acids
- Brain and body exercise
- Ron's Rule: communicate
- The single common factor in families who do well with behavior changes in HD seems to be communication. It takes work to achieve it and even more work to maintain it, but the result is worth the effort.