G. Haicault de la Regontais’s scientific contributions

The fear that an Alzheimer's disease patient might present behavioral disorders during travel or in flight is a real concern. Such events must be prevented by taking the necessary steps after a relevant assessment of autonomy. This assessment will inevitably include an evaluation of the patient's loss of capacity to carry out activities of daily life. Three behavioral scales are particularly useful for the assessment of the Alzheimer patient wishing to travel. The short neuropsychiatric inventory or NPI-R, the Disability Assessment for Dementia (DAD), and an alert score related to the states of anxiety of the elderly person. To date, due to the lack of appropriate counseling, weakened elderly subjects as well as Alzheimer's disease patients and their caregivers have had little opportunity to escape their local environment and undertake successful travel outside their own frontiers.

It is well known that Alzheimer's disease leads to premature social exclusion. Fighting against this fate is an uphill battle but helping an Alzheimer patient undertake travel is also very difficult. In order to complete the clinical assessment necessary for any candidate wishing to travel by air, the physician must ascertain the effects and consequences aeronautical constraints will have on the candidate's body, both in terms of physical and psychic stress. The clinical stage of the process must obviously go beyond an update of the subject's immunization status and a renewal of prescription drugs. The medical guarantee of aptitude also requires an assessment of the cardiopulmonary state of the passenger and knowledge of any comorbidity and subsequent somatic fragility. An assessment of the candidate's aeronautical psychological profile, reflected by prior air flights, as well as a behavioral assessment are also needed. The site www.voyage-aptitude-senior.fr has been designed to help potential candidates prepare themselves and get ready for the necessary medical capacity consultation prior to their travel.

While any physician can readily assess the physical capacity of an Alzheimer's disease patient to undertake air travel, it is much more difficult to apprehend the corresponding psychological aptitude. An assessment of the patient's psychological profile is however an essential step before authorizing air travel for any length of time. The physician who evaluates the capacity of an Alzheimer patient to board a plane must acquire knowledge about the different psychical sensations the passenger can be expected to experience in flight and the behaviors which would ensue.