By Sylvia Wray Executive Director, Alzheimer's Services Center Dementia is the broad term used to describe several different conditions affecting the brain that causes the loss of cognitive functioning (the ability to think, remember, or reason) that it interferes with a person’s daily life and activities. These functions include memory, language skills, problemsolving, self-management, and the ability to focus and pay attention. Dementia ranges in severity from mild to severe. Mild stage is just beginning to affect a person’s functioning. The most severe stage is when the person must depend completely on others for basic activities of daily living. Dementia affects three areas of the brain: language, memory, and decision-making. There are 7 Types of Dementia: Alzheimer’s, Vascular Dementia, Lewy Body Dementia, Parkinson’s, Frontotemporal, Huntington’s Disease, and other causes. Alzheimer’s Disease is the most common type of Dementia. According to the Alzheimer’s Association, 60 to 80 percent of the cases of Dementia is caused by this disease. The symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease are generally mild to start with, but as more brain cells are damaged over time the symptoms get worse and start to interfere with a person’s day-to-day life. Some warning signs of Alzheimer’s Disease are memory loss that disrupts daily life, challenges in planning or solving problems, difficulty completing familiar tasks, confusion with time or place, new problems with words in speaking or writing, misplacing things and losing the ability to retrace steps, poor judgement, withdrawal from social activities, and changes in mood and personality. The second most common type of dementia is Vascular Dementia. It’s caused by the lack of blood flow to the brain.
In Vascular Dementia, there are changes in thinking skills that sometimes occur suddenly after a stroke. This blocks major blood vessels in the brain. Symptoms of Vascular Dementia can appear slowly or suddenly, depending on what’s causing it. Early signs are confusion and disorientation. Later signs are having trouble completing tasks or concentrating for long periods of time. Lewy body dementia is caused by protein deposits in nerve cells. These interrupts chemical messages in the brain and causes memory loss and disorientation. Lewy body dementia is a type of progressive dementia that leads to a decline in thinking, reasoning, and independent function. Some symptoms of Lewy body dementia include confusion and alertness, well-formed visual hallucinations, delusions, and sleep disturbances. Parkinson’s Disease dementia usually develops in some people living with Parkinson’s at least a year after their diagnosis. Early signs of this type of dementia are problems with reasoning and judgement. Some commonly reported symptoms include changes in memory, concentration and judgement, muffled speech, visual hallucinations and delusions, especially paranoid ideas. Frontotemporal dementia are forms of dementia caused by a family of neurodegenerative brain diseases collectively, all with one thing in common: They affect the front and side parts of the brain, which are areas that control language and behavior.
The two most prominent diseases that cause frontotemporal degenerations are a group of brain disorders involving the protein tau and a group of brain disorders involving the protein called TDP43. Huntington’s disease is a genetic condition that causes dementia. It is a progressive brain disorder caused by a defective gene. There are two types that exist: juvenile onset (which is rare) and adult onset (which occur in a person when they’re in their 30s or 40s. Some symptoms include difficulty focusing on tasks, impulse control problems, trouble speaking clearly and difficult learning new things. There are some other causes of dementia which includes Creutzfeldt-Jackob, Wernicke-Korsakoff, Normal pressure hydrocephalus and Mixed dementia. Many other diseases can also cause dementia in the later stages. For example, people with multiple sclerosis can develop dementia. While June is Alzheimer’s and Brain Awareness month, we want to highlight it all year. Let’s go purple to raise awareness for Alzheimer’s. According to the Alzheimer’s Association, more that 55 million people are living with Alzheimer’s or another dementia. Join me in going purple and raising awareness about Alzheimer’s and other related dementias and the Alzheimer’s Services Center, Adult Day Services located at 7251 Mount Zion Circle, Morrow, GA 30260. www.ascga.org
SPRING 2022/SUMMER 2022
