88-year-old actor Manabu Yamamoto appeared on Tetsuko Kuroyanagi's long-running talk show "Tetsuko's Room" (TV Asahi) on December 1st. He spoke about his daily life with mild cognitive impairment and how to deal with it.
Three years ago, he began to have visual hallucinations. He says that suddenly, he began seeing shapes on the wall, and this symptom continued. "My father had Alzheimer's," so he read a few books on the subject. He consulted a neurosurgeon, who referred him to a psychiatrist. After tests, he was diagnosed with mild cognitive impairment. "Dementia causes symptoms of forgetfulness, and over a period of about seven years, as you go about your daily life, brain function starts to atrophy and gradually declines," he says.
She thought that if she could change her lifestyle, she might be able to slow down the progression, and what helped her the most was exercising two or three times a week. Living alone, her house was a "mess," but before she knew it, it was neat and tidy. "Rehabilitation is helping. I tidy up by myself. It's important to have a good balance in your life," she said.
She fell at home 10 days before the program was filmed. "I was in the entranceway, holding something in both hands, the mail, my bag, and starting to take off my shoes." She said that she tripped and fell on her nose because she didn't take her shoes off properly. Her nose was bent and she started bleeding. "Rather than being scared, they say you fall when you get older, but I realized that this is what happens. I was like that for about a minute after the fall, thinking that I should call an ambulance (to the hospital) and that I must have done a lot of damage, and when I got up, it was blood, dripping with blood," she revealed.
As someone who has experienced mild cognitive impairment, he says, "It's best to go to a psychiatrist as soon as possible." He recently worked on a TV program, and said, "I'm not much better at remembering my lines than before. I have mild cognitive impairment, but this part is fine, and it seems like the symptoms vary from person to person."
Recently, he played a role in which he suffered from dementia. Symptoms of dementia include forgetfulness, but he also said, "You become very angry and unable to control your emotions." He also said that by acting, he learned what real dementia is like.
