Dementia

Dementia (from Latin demens) is progressive decline in cognitive function due to damage or disease in the brain beyond what might be expected from normal aging. Particularly affected areas may be memory, attention, language and problem solving, although particularly in the later stages of the condition, affected persons may be disoriented in time (not knowing what day, week, month or year it is), place (not knowing where they are) and person (not knowing who they are). Symptoms of dementia can be classified as either reversible or irreversible depending upon the etiology of the disease, although dementia, by definition, is irreversible and will eventually result in death. Probably less than 5% of all dementias are reversible. Dementia is a non-specific term that encompasses many disease processes, just as fever is attributable to many etiologies.

Types

The most common types of dementia are as follows and vary according to the history and the presentation of the disease:

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• Alzheimer's disease
• Multi-infarct dementia (also known as vascular dementia), including Binswanger's disease
• Dementia with Lewy bodies (DLB)
• Frontotemporal lobar degeneration (FTLD), including Pick's disease and dementia lacking distinctive histology (DLDH)
• Frontal variant frontotemporal dementia
• Semantic dementia
• Progressive non-fluent aphasia

It can also be a consequence of:

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• Head trauma
• Parkinson's disease
• Huntington's disease
• Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease
• AIDS

Less than 5% of a sample of dementia cases have a potentially treatable cause. These include:

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• Depressive pseudodementia (note: dementia and depression can coexist in many patients and can be difficult to differentiate.)
• Hypothyroidism
• Normal pressure hydrocephalus
• Vitamin B12 deficiency
• Vitamin B1 (thiamine) deficiency
• Tumour

People with Down's syndrome have an increased risk of developing dementia of the Alzheimer's type. This risk increases as the person ages.

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There is no cure to this illness although scientists are progressing in making a type of medication thatwill slow down the process

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