INFORMATION ON DEMENTIA

Dementia  syndrome is a descriptive term for a collection of symptoms caused by a number of disorders affecting the brain.
Dementia, a progressive brain dysfunction, leads to a gradually increasing restriction of daily activities. It leads to significantly impaired intellectual functioning that interferes with normal activities and relationships. Affected people lose their ability to solve problems and maintain emotional control, like thinking and orientation and may experience personality changes, social act and behavioral problems, such as agitation, delusions, and hallucinations; lack of comprehension, calculation, learning capacity, language and judgment. Memory loss is a common symptom of dementia. There is also impairment of thinking and of reasoning capacity, and a reduction in the flow of ideas. The processing of incoming information is impaired, in that the individual finds it increasingly difficult to attend to more than one stimulus at a time, such as taking part in a conversation with several persons, and to shift the focus of attention from one topic to another.
Many diseases can lead to dementia, most important being "Alzheimer's disease". Dementia not only affects patients, but also those surrounding them, as most patients require care in the long-term.

CAUSES OF DEMENTIA

1. Alzheimer’s disease or Huntington’s disease
2. Vascular dementia (or multi-infarct dementia), including Binswanger's disease
3. Dementia with Lewy bodies (DLB)
4. Frontotemporal lobar degeneration (FTLD), including Pick's disease
5. Frontotemporal dementia (or frontal variant FTLD)
6. Semantic dementia (or temporal variant FTLD)
7. Progressive non-fluent aphasia
8. It can also be a consequence of:
9. Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease
10. Huntington's disease
11. Parkinson's disease
12. HIV infection (leading to AIDS dementia complex)
13. Head trauma
14. Down's syndrome
15. Hypothyroidism
16. Vitamin B1 (thiamine) deficiency
17. Vitamin B12, Vitamin A deficiency
18. Depressive pseudodementia
19. Normal pressure hydrocephalus

SYMPTOMS OF DEMENTIA

Important early indications of Dementia:

1. Forgetfulness with effects at work
2. Difficulties with familiar activities (including absent mindedness)
3. Language problems (Difficulty understanding and using misappropriate fillers)
4. Problems with spatial and temporal orientation
5. Impaired capacity of judgement
6. Problems with abstract thinking
7. Leaving things behind
8. Mood swings and behavioral changes (sudden)
9. Personality changes (unexpected anger, jealous or timid)
10. Loss of initiative (loss of interest and zest)
11. Delusions - Monothematic Delusions, like mirrored self-misidentification

TREATMENT OF DEMENTIA

As with numerous other diseases there is no cure for the illness but medication can improve disease symptoms. There are a number of drugs available today for improving brain function. Typically anti-dementia or psychotropic drugs are prescribed. Although these drugs do not halt the disease or reverse existing brain damage, they improve symptoms and slow the progression of the disease. This may improve an individual’s quality of life, ease the burden on caregivers, or delay admission to a nursing home..