How to keep track of an elderly parent's symptoms between visits

October 4, 2026

From Centis, a free care notebook you talk to. Everything in this guide works with pen and paper too.

A doctor sees your parent for part of an afternoon every few weeks or months. You see the days in between, and that’s where most changes happen.

They rarely arrive all at once. A little more tired each week. Eating a bit less. Steady most days, unsteady on one. Each change is small enough to brush off on the day it happens. Together they make a picture no single day shows.

Keeping track turns “they’ve seemed a bit off lately” into something a doctor can work with: what changed, when it started, and how often. You don’t need a medical background or a complicated system. You need to know what to note, how to write it down, and a way of doing it that lasts beyond the first week.

Which symptoms and changes are worth tracking?

The rule of thumb is anything that’s different from their usual. You know their usual better than anyone, which is exactly why your notes are worth having.

New symptoms. Pain, dizziness, breathlessness, a cough, a rash, swelling: anything that wasn’t there before.
Things that are coming back or getting more frequent. Once is worth a line. The third time in a week is the kind of pattern a log exists to catch.
Falls, near-falls and unsteadiness. Include the near-misses. They’re the easiest thing to forget by the time of the appointment.
Eating and drinking. Skipped meals, smaller portions, drinking less, trouble swallowing.
Sleep. Up in the night, sleeping much more in the day, or a change in either.
Memory, mood and behaviour. Confusion, repeating questions, withdrawal, agitation, anything that isn’t like them.
Medications. Doses missed or refused, and anything started, stopped or changed.
Toilet and continence. Not pleasant to write down, but worth including, and easy to forget to mention.

What you don’t need: a detailed entry for every ordinary day. A good day can be one line, “normal day, ate well”, or nothing at all. The log is for change, and a log that’s mostly routine hides the few lines that matter.

How to note it so it means something later

A note you write today is read weeks from now, sometimes by someone else. Four things make the difference.

The date, and the time if it matters. “Dizzy, Sep 14, getting out of the chair” can be placed. “Dizzy sometimes” can’t.

How often and how long. “Third time this week”, “lasted about a minute”, “every morning since Monday”. They’re the first details memory blurs, and the hardest to reconstruct later.

What was happening at the time. Standing up, after a meal, in the night, after a new tablet started. Note the circumstances as plain facts. That isn’t the same as saying what caused it.

What you saw, in your words, not what you think it means. “Asked where her husband was, he died in 2019” rather than “getting worse”. “Out of breath on the stairs, had to stop halfway” rather than a guess at the reason. Leave the interpreting to the doctor. If you write a cause into the note, the conversation can start from your guess instead of from what happened.

A simple way to track symptoms: a log you can copy

One line per thing, newest at the top, in a notes app or a notebook kept somewhere you’ll see it.

[date] — [what happened, in your words] — [how often / how long] — [what was going on at the time]

Sep 21 — dizzy getting up from the sofa, sat back down — about a minute — just after lunch
Sep 19 — only ate half her dinner, said she wasn't hungry — second night running
Sep 18 — normal day, walked to the shop
Sep 16 — asked what day it was three times — morning only
Sep 14 — dizzy getting out of the chair — a few seconds — first time I've noticed
Sep 12 — new blood pressure tablet started (Dr. Lee)

Read it once a week. Patterns that are invisible day to day often stand out on a page: dizziness that keeps showing up after getting up, appetite dropping over a fortnight. You don’t need to work out what they mean. Spotting them is enough, and the next step is bringing them to the appointment.

Making it last past the first week

It’s common for a log to start out thorough and then quietly stop. A few things help one survive a hard month.

Write it straight after. After the visit, the phone call or the evening check-in, while it’s fresh. Reconstructing the week on a Sunday night doesn’t work, because by then the details have gone.
Keep it to a line. If a note takes five minutes you’ll skip it when you’re tired, which is exactly when the important things happen.
Keep one log, in one place. Notes scattered across texts, a notebook and the back of an envelope can’t be read as a timeline.
Let everyone add to it. If siblings or other carers visit too, one shared log beats four people’s memories. Each line should say who noticed it.
Don’t aim for complete. A log with gaps is still far better than no log. Missing a day isn’t a reason to stop.

For some people, saying it is easier than typing it. A voice memo on your phone works, and so does Centis, which turns what you say into dated lines.

What a log is not for

Keeping track is for the slow changes, the kind that only show up over weeks. It doesn’t replace whatever you’d normally do when something worries you, and nothing about it means holding a concern back until the next appointment. It isn’t for emergencies either: in one, call emergency services. Whatever happened, write it down afterwards. It will be one of the most useful lines in the log.

When writing it down is the hard part

When an appointment comes up, the log becomes the page you bring with you. What to write down before a parent's doctor appointment covers how to turn it into one.

If typing a line after every visit is what keeps not happening, Centis lets you say it out loud instead. You talk for thirty seconds and it keeps the log for you: each note dated, in your own words, with the things worth noting flagged. You can ask it things like “has she been dizzy before?” and get the dates back. It’s free, and you can use it on your own without an account.