NEW ATHENS - When 83-year-old Verda Edwards began experiencing hallucinations late last year, her doctor figured it was another cut-and-dried case of Alzheimer's disease.

He prescribed an anti-psychotic drug to ease the hallucinations and another drug to boost her memory. But within three months, Edwards became a feeble, helpless shell of her former vibrant self.

"All she could do was just sit there in the chair," her daughter, Carla Ehlers, remembers. "She didn't read, she didn't watch television, she didn't listen to her music. I mean she had no interest in anything whatsoever."

That's when Ehlers, a former longtime attorney with Flynn & Guymon in Belleville, took on her mother's medical case in earnest. Certain her mother's condition was unlike any Alzheimer's she had ever seen, Ehlers took to the Internet and found geriatric specialist Dr. Kyle Moylan at Barnes-Jewish Hospital in St. Louis.

Just minutes after he met her, Moylan knew Ehlers' hunch was right. Edwards does not have Alzheimer's. Moreover, she was on an anti-psychotic drug that had turned her once mobile body into a stiff board in just weeks.

Edwards had a relatively unknown condition called Lewy body dementia and needed her medications changed. The result? Well, let's just say that one day last summer Edwards had no rest until she took a couple of swipes across Ehlers' lawn with her daughter's mower.

"I feel just fine!" Edwards declared one recent morning with a spunky, sassy energy that gave little hint of her almost complete debilitation a few months before. "I have no problems. Well, maybe a few. But nothing major!"

"She has probably gained back five years," agreed her daughter, sitting nearby. "She's doing great now."

She certainly has come a long way from last November, when she began seeing and hearing things that simply were not there.

"For example, she couldn't sleep one night because of the construction going on outside -- and there was no construction going on outside," Ehlers said. "She saw my father, who's been deceased for many years. She saw me as a baby. So she had some serious hallucinations."

"They had a hard time making me believe there wasn't nobody out there," Edwards said. "Oh, yeah, it was very real."

She was prescribed Risperdal, an anti-psychotic typically used to tame the voices that people with schizophrenia hear. A few weeks later, when Edwards sold her West Frankfort home to move into an assisted living center, a neurologist diagnosed her with Alzheimer's and added Aricept, a memory enhancer, to her drug regimen.

The cure quickly proved worse than the supposed disease. The hallucinations decreased significantly, but Risperdal can produce symptoms that closely resemble Parkinson's disease -- a shuffling gait, tremors, rigid muscles and an overall slowing of body motion.

Edwards turned into one big side effect. By the time she moved into her daughter's home in late January, she could barely lift a fork to her mouth to feed herself.

"I mean she'd be in bed and could not roll over," said Ehlers, who spent long nights sitting next to her mother to keep her comfortable. "Her body was just really rigid, and she was tending to fall a lot, too."

But Ehlers found one thing strange. Despite the occasional minor hallucinations her mother still experienced, Edwards' mind and memory seemed sharp. This was unlike the Alzheimer's Ehlers had seen in her aunt, a fact that led Ehlers to seek out Moylan.

It turned out to be a wise decision, since few doctors, much less the public in general, have ever heard of Lewy body dementia -- also known as dementia with Lewy bodies or diffuse Lewy body disease.

"It's a rather new, distinct medical illness," Moylan said. "In fact, the definition is still evolving. It's often probably not diagnosed, but some think it may be responsible for as many as 15 percent of dementia cases. Some now call it the second most common neurodegenerative disease."

The progressive disease is kind of an overlap between Parkinson's and Alzheimer's, Moylan said. It's named for Friederich Lewy, a scientist who, while researching Parkinson's in the early 1900s, discovered abnormal deposits of protein that disrupt the brain's normal functioning. These deposits are now called "Lewy bodies."

Some of these deposits are found in the brain stem, where they deplete the neurotransmitter dopamine, causing Parkinson's symptoms. But some deposits may form in higher regions of the brain, producing problems with thinking and memory.

In Edwards' case, the hallucinations should have been a dead giveaway to the diagnosis. Alzheimer's patients rarely experience hallucinations early on in their disease, but they're usually a hallmark symptom in Lewy body dementia.

"They're often pretty well-formed hallucinations, too, where they see people they know or animals or children," Moylan said. "But they also seem pretty aware that it's not real, and often some people aren't very bothered by them, which is kind of surprising."

Lewy body patients also often exhibit symptoms of Parkinson's disease. As in Edwards' case, these symptoms can be exacerbated by the wrong medication.

"Probably more important than anything is not to use the wrong medicine," Moylan said. "You hurt people a lot more than you help them using the wrong drug."

Finally, Alzheimer's usually starts with mild memory problems and slowly, but steadily, progresses. Patients with Lewy body may fluctuate widely in their functioning, appearing lucid one day and confused the next.

"They have such severe fluctuations in how alert they are that at times people are thought to have passed out or had a seizure," Moylan said. "They're almost unconscious. So it's not too uncommon to see patients admitted to the hospital a couple of times to try and find out why they're passing out."

Currently, no cure or treatment is available but medications can help manage both the physical and psychological symptoms. A person commonly lives five to seven years with the disease, although they may survive as many as 20, according to the Lewy Body Dementia Association in Tempe, Ariz.

For Edwards, the road back had its early potholes. When taken off her Risperdal, she became extremely agitated -- "like someone who had been on drugs and was coming down," her daughter said.

Edwards said she doesn't remember much about those days, but with her new anti-psychotic, Seroquel, she is back to her old self, helping fix dinner, washing dishes, folding wash and watching her Gaither Family gospel videos.

"I think I do about as much as any other almost 84-year-old would do," she says proudly.

And, although she still has occasional hallucinations, her mind seems little affected otherwise. She remembers both her next appointment with Moylan (in December) and that she was just 17 when she married 16-year-old Carl in 1939. (He died in 1997.)

"Not all dementia is Alzheimer's disease," Moylan said. "So, when people have atypical presentations of their dementia, they should really see a specialist to try to be more confident about what the problem is and that it's being managed correctly."

Contact reporter Roger Schlueter at 239-2465 or rschlueter@bnd.com