Dementia is one of the major neurodegenerative disorders that exclusively affect older people. These days, the term dementia has fallen out of use in medical circles, and the condition is described as Major Neurocognitive Disorder (MND). Sometimes, dementia is used interchangeably with Alzheimer’s disease, but the two conditions are clinically separate. Even so, early-age Alzheimer’s disease is considered the most common cause of dementia. The symptoms of dementia include loss of memory and other cognitive functions, including reasoning, thinking, and logical abilities. Dementia can be controlled with timely medical treatment and specific lifestyle changes to optimise cognitive processes.
What are the symptoms of Dementia?
The signs of dementia correlate with the symptoms listed below:
- Memory loss: Forgetfulness is a common problem in dementia when remembering even recent incidents becomes difficult.
- Misplacing things: Misplacing everyday use items becomes frequent.
- Getting lost easily: Dementia patients tend to forget their way home or remember places they usually frequent. The person may get confused remembering even familiar places.
- Loss of sense of time: Tracking the timing of daily activities becomes increasingly difficult.
- Problem-solving difficulty: Logical reasoning becomes increasingly complex, including solving problems they could easily set right earlier.
- Difficulty in making decisions: Making even the simplest of decisions becomes problematic.
- Trouble responding: Replying to the simplest of questions, for instance, about their food habits or daily activities, becomes challenging. They even struggle to find the correct words.
- Self-feeding inability: Individuals with severe cases of dementia cannot eat independently and need someone to feed them.
- Personality changes: This change occurs in moderate to severe cases of dementia. The patient may behave entirely differently from their original nature.
- Loss of balance: Maintaining balance while walking or doing something becomes arduous.