Alzheimer's disease & dementia

Active social lives can help dementia patients, caregivers thrive

People with dementia and those who care for them should be screened for loneliness, so providers can find ways to keep them socially connected, according to experts at UC San Francisco and Harvard, who made the recommendations ...

Neuroscience

People with essential tremor may have increased risk of dementia

Dementia may be three times more common among people with essential tremor, a movement disorder that causes involuntary shaking, than the general population, according to research released today, March 6, 2024. The study ...

Alzheimer's disease & dementia

Social determinants of health increase Alzheimer's risk

Social determinants of health are increasing the risk of Alzheimer's disease and related dementia, finds a recent study from the Brown School and the School of Medicine at Washington University in St. Louis.

Alzheimer's disease & dementia

Understanding lucid episodes in dementia

A recent Mayo Clinic study published in Alzheimer's & Dementia investigated lucid episodes in people living with later stages of dementia, providing insights into how these occurrences reveal themselves.

page 1 from 40

Dementia

Dementia (meaning "deprived of mind") is a cognitive impairment. It may be static, the result of a unique global brain injury or progressive, resulting in long-term decline in cognitive function due to damage or disease in the body beyond what might be expected from normal aging. Although dementia is far more common in the geriatric population, it may occur in any stage of adulthood. This age cutoff is defining, as similar sets of symptoms due to organic brain syndrome or dysfunction, are given different names in populations younger than adult. Up to the end of the nineteenth century, dementia was a much broader clinical concept.

Dementia is a non-specific illness syndrome (set of signs and symptoms) in which affected areas of cognition may be memory, attention, language, and problem solving. It is normally required to be present for at least 6 months to be diagnosed; cognitive dysfunction which has been seen only over shorter times, particularly less than weeks, must be termed delirium. In all types of general cognitive dysfunction, higher mental functions are affected first in the process. Especially in the later stages of the condition, affected persons may be disoriented in time (not knowing what day of the week, day of the month, or even what year it is), in place (not knowing where they are), and in person (not knowing who they are or others around them). Dementia, though often treatable to some degree, is usually due to causes which are progressive and incurable.

Symptoms of dementia can be classified as either reversible or irreversible, depending upon the etiology of the disease. Less than 10 percent of cases of dementia are due to causes which may presently be reversed with treatment. Causes include many different specific disease processes, in the same way that symptoms of organ dysfunction such as shortness of breath, jaundice, or pain are attributable to many etiologies. Without careful assessment of history, the short-term syndrome of delirium (often lasting days to weeks) can easily be confused with dementia, because they have all symptoms in common, save duration, and the fact that delirium is often associated with over-activity of the sympathetic nervous system. Some mental illnesses, including depression and psychosis, may also produce symptoms which must be differentiated from both delirium and dementia.

This text uses material from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA