Patients with Alzheimer’s disease have a new ally, as a growing number of New York City art museums are looking to create programs for patients with the degenerative brain disorder.

Last month, the Metropolitan Museum of Art launched a special tour of its galleries for Alzheimer’s patients, building on the popularity of a similar program at the Museum of Modern Art. The programs are tailored to meet the limitations of participants, meaning information and context are repeated.

“There definitely is a demand, or an interest for more,” the director of community access programs at the MoMA, Francesca Rosenberg, said. Since 2006, the museum has held “Meet me at MoMA” sessions for Alzheimer’s patients. On Friday, the museum is hosting a symposium, “The Value and Importance of Art in Health Care,” cosponsored by Vanderbilt University Medical Center and the Society for Arts in Healthcare.

At a pre-symposium workshop yesterday, representatives from other museums — the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, the American Folk Art Museum, and the Queens Museum of Art among them — heard tips for replicating MoMA’s program. Several attendees said they sought to produce something similar.

“I think it is a group that can really benefit,” a museum educator at the American Folk Art Museum, Jennifer Kalter, said.

“There is something stand-up about it as opposed to going to the nursing home for treatment,” the coordinator of an existing art therapy program at the Queens Museum of Art, Donnielle Rome, said. “It’s about giving them that moment.”

More than 5 million Americans have Alzheimer’s, characterized by memory loss. There is no known cure, but medication can help early on.

The museum programs do not halt memory loss, an assistant professor of psychiatry at Mount Sinai School of Medicine, Dr. Margaret Sewell, said. But they can improve a patient’s quality of life, jog their long-term memory, or improve symptoms of Alzheimer’s. “It lowers their depression, it lowers their symptoms of agitation, it increases their self-esteem,” she said.

The location of the programs is key to some. “It may not bring up a memory, but it may bring up a feeling from the past that was positive,” a genetic counselor at the Taub Institute for Research on Alzheimer’s Disease and the Aging Brain at Columbia University Medical Center, Jill Goldman, said. Ms. Goldman, who helped to develop the Met’s program, “Met Escapes,” aims to hold a support group for Alzheimer’s patients at the museum. “The idea was to have these people come — not to a place where it’s all about their diagnosis,” she said.

Nationwide, there has been growing interest in a field that juxtaposes art and medicine.

“As a field, it is really growing and developing,” the executive director of the Society for the Arts in Healthcare, Anita Boles, said. Since 2005, the group’s membership has increased to 1,700 from 500.

Those in the field said the term “art therapy” is loosely defined, and it can refer to the aesthetic of hospitals or programs that rehabilitate patients through art. The latter category also has broad parameters.

Catering to Alzheimer’s patients is a main focus.

So far, the Met has held three “Met Escapes” sessions. To foster a multi-sensory experience, the museum provides materials similar to those found in exhibits that participants can touch.

The museum has a history of such programs, the Met’s access coordinator, Rebecca McGinnis, said. She said the mean age of the museum’s visitors is getting older. “Reaching people with Alzheimer’s and other kinds of dementia is going to be especially important, just as looking at assisted listening devices and large-print labels,” she said.