Dr. Mehmet Oz just opened up to say that he is “frustrated and mad” after he missed the signs that his mother was battling Alzheimer’s disease.
Oz explained that he and his sisters had noticed earlier this year that their 81 year-old mother Suna was acting strangely, but they chalked it up to aging and stress as well as the death of their father in February. It wasn’t until Suna’s “stubborn” behavior became “irrational” that they decided to get her tested and learned that she had Alzheimer’s.
Oz, 59, explained that “it was a punch in the gut” that he “completely missed the signs,” but he decided to go public in the hopes of helping others to save their loved ones sooner.
“I’m feeling guilty because I completely missed the signs until fairly late in the process,” Oz said.
In an emotional Instagram post, Oz talked about the signs he missed in his mom. His mom did her make-up differently and was forgetting certain words as well as showing other signs of Alzheimer’s.
‘When my mom’s stubbornness increased, I simply blamed it on her getting older,” Oz wrote. “When my mom started giving some of her belongings away to people she barely knew, I thought she was just trying to lighten her load following my father’s passing. But these seemingly subtle changes were in fact the first indicators of Alzheimer’s.”
Experts estimated that 44 million people in the world have Alzheimer’s, with 5.7 million of them living in the United States. Though Alzheimer’s has no known cure, experts say physical exercise, social interaction and adding brain boosting omega-3 fats to your diet can slow down the onset of symptoms.
Oz said his mother is living in Turkey and is being cared for by one of his sisters.
“She’s aware, but she’s forgetting some things,” he said. “My daughter] Daphne had a baby girl 20 days ago and I called mom to tell her. She knows Daphne, but she couldn’t quite process that Daphne had a child.”
Oz added that he debated whether or not to go public with her diagnosis, but decided it was something he needed to do.
“I know that there are millions of other people like me, who probably feel guilt the way I do, knowing that if we could have figured this out earlier, I could have intervened a little bit,” he said. “Everyone in my family probably could’ve figured this out, myself included. “But my wishful thinking was that it was just mom being a little bit older, she’s stressed out, my dad was ill. And so we lost our truth.”
On top of that, Oz said he learned he carries one of the genes that puts him at risk for developing Alzheimer’s himself.
“That was shocking. I guess you don’t expect it,” he said. “But from my perspective, my mom gave me a great set of cards to play life with and she taught me how to play those cards. But she gave me one bad card and I can’t throw that card away, I’m stuck with it.”
Watch Dr. Oz talk about this more in the video below.
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