Dementia
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Dementia (from L. 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).
Affected persons may also show signs of psychosis and delirium.
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Diagnosis
Proper differential diagnosis between the types of dementia (see below) will require at the least, referral to a specialist, e.g. a geriatrician or neurologist. However, to establish dementia as a possibility the Abbreviated Mental Test Score may be used.
Abbreviated Mental Test Score (AMTS)
Ask these questions of the patient. Each question correctly answered scores one point.
Question |
Score |
|---|---|
What is your age? | |
What is the time to the nearest hour? | |
Give the patient an address, and ask him or her to repeat it at the end of the test | |
What is the year? | |
What is the name of the hospital or number of the residence where the patient is situated? | |
Can the patient recognize two persons (the doctor, nurse, home help, etc.) | |
What is your date of birth? | |
In which year did the First World War begin (adjust this for a world event the patient would have known during childhood)? | |
What is the name of the present monarch (head of state, etc.)? | |
Count backwards from 20 down to 1? |
A score of less than six on this test suggests dementia. Routine blood tests should be performed to rule out treatable causes.
Types
The most common types of dementia are as follows and vary according to the history and the presentation of the disease:
- Alzheimer's disease
- multi-infarct dementia (also known as vascular dementia), including Binswanger's disease
- Frontotemporal dementia including Pick's disease
- Corticobasal degeneration
- Semantic dementia
Approximately 10% of a sample of suspected dementia cases, will have a potentially treatable cause. These include:
- Depressive pseudodementia
- Acute confusional state or delirium
- Hypothyroidism
- Normal pressure hydrocephalus
- Vitamin B12 deficiency
- Vitamin B6 (thiamin) deficiency
- Tumor
or in very rare cases
- Frontal lobe type
- Head trauma
- Parkinson's disease
- Huntington's disease
- Down's syndrome
- Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease
- AIDS
External links
Dementia was also the stage name of a female wrestler on G.L.O.W. (Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling) during the eighties. Her trademarks were never speaking, her pale, hollow-eyed look, unkempt hair, tattered gauze dress, and perpetually carrying a baby doll into the ring, which she was very overprotective of, actually throwing temper tantrums if it was taken away from her. The character was played by two actresses: Michelle Damon and Nancy Daly. Damon later wrestled in G.L.O.W. under a new persona, "Sugar".
Dementia was also a 1955 horror movie about a night in the life of a disturbed woman and the thoughts running inside her own backwards, scrambled head. It was later called "Daughter of Horror", and narration was added. Scenes from the movie appear in The Blob,(1958) starring Steve McQueen.
Another movie with this title was made in 1999.
An early and obscure Francis Ford Coppola effort called Dementia 13 was made in 1963. The number was added when the director discovered "Dementia" had already been taken. He shared the movie set, on location in Ireland, with Roger Corman, with the provision that he film only on days Corman was not working.
de:Demenz
ms:Penyakit Dementia
nl:Dementie
ja:痴呆
