Drs: Celebrity Apprentice Leeza Gibbons On Alzheimer’s Disease

The Drs: Celebrity Apprentice, Leeza Gibbons

The Doctors kicked off their show by welcoming Emmy Award-winning TV personality Leeza Gibbons, who recently joined the cast of Celebrity Apprentice. Leeza said there’s a lot of eclectic teammates this season, and said if you’re an Apprentice fan, you will not be disappointed. She added that she feels like she got an advanced degree from “Trump University.”

The Drs: Leeza Gibbons On Alzheimer’s Disease

The Doctors then shared that every 67 seconds, someone in the United States develops Alzheimer’s Disease and more than five million Americans are currently living with it. Leeza has been an advocate to raise awareness for Alzheimer’s, in particular working with Leeza’s Care Connection that is dedicated to helping families answer the question “now what?” when they get a diagnosis.

Leeza shared that her grandmother and mother both had Alzheimer’s, and said that people who have a family history of the disease do have an increased risk. “But if you have a brain, you’re at risk for Alzheimer’s disease,” Leeza said. She said it’s a global epidemic.

She shared that ten years ago, she decided to start helping families and started working with a group called Senior Helpers as well as her non-profit. Senior Helpers is one of the largest in-home care providers, who help people with everything from hygiene and meal prep to caring for people after accidents. They developed a program called Senior Gems, which puts the different stages of Alzheimer’s into categories labeled as various gems. You can order it from Senior Helpers for free.

The Drs: Understanding Alzheimer’s Disease

She said people spend so much time on how a toddler’s brain works, but when it comes to your loved one with dementia, they need to understand how their brain works to know why they’re behaving a certain way.

Dr Rachael Ross pointed out that 15 million adults are dealing with a parent who has Alzheimer’s, so to imagine the stress they’re under to understand what’s going on with their parents makes it that much easier. Dr Drew Ordon lost his mother to Alzheimer’s and said he understands the feelings of guilt and frustration. He said even as a doctor, he wanted to know more and wanted to do more to help her.

Leeza said Alzheimer’s is the disease that people fear the most, even more than cancer, but yet it’s something we avoid the most. She suggested people go to her website and take self-administered tests that take five minutes or less. There’s five of them and they have a pretty high degree of accuracy, although they are not diagnostic tools. They can answer some questions if you’re worried about you or a loved one.

Leeza said we have to get “engaged and enraged” so that we can get a handle on the disease.