DEMENTIA AND ALZHEIMER’S

Alzheimer’s and dementia are two medical terms that we often hear these days. Both of them are neurological disorders which are similar to each other yet are worlds apart. Many a times these terms have been used interchangeably. But that is not the truth. Both diseases are different though they have similarities. Dementia is a progressive brain dysfunction that affects your ability to think, speak, reason, remember, etc. It gradually restricts the ability of an individual to perform his daily activities by himself. While some of such patients show regressive symptoms even with treatment, some patients have actually survived it and come back into life. Dementia can be caused by many factors and the most popular reason is Alzheimer’s disease. Alzheimer’s is a progressive fatal brain disease that destroys brain cells and can cause hamper to a person’s memory, behaviour and thinking. Alzheimer’s is the most common form of dementia that has no current cure. We can only help them to live a better life by recognizing their symptoms early on and giving them proper nursing care.

Dementia and Alzheimer’s is not the same. Dementia is only a symptom of a disorder in brain that causes disorientation of intellectual abilities. Alzheimer’s is a disease that causes dementia. In frontotemporal dementia, the patient retains his ability to carry out motor performance activities while in Alzheimer’s he may lose his memory and orientation completely. Alzheimer’s harms his ability to perform even his day-to-day activities like eating and using toilet. Alzheimer’s is incurable while dementia, caused by many other factors, is irreversible. Basically there are 2 different categories of dementia - cortical and subcortical dementia. Cortical dementia is caused due to a disorder in cerebral cortex that controls our memory and language. These patients show severe memory impairment and aphasia. Subcortical dementia is caused by disorder in different parts of the brain that are below the cerebral cortex. This affects the person’s personality and attention span. Its forms are Huntington’s disease, Parkinson’s disease and AIDS dementia complex. Multi-infarct dementia affects both sides of the brain and it is a rare occurrence. Apart from Alzheimer’s, the other types of dementia are vascular dementias, multi-infarct dementia, Parkinson’s disease, Huntington's disease, HIV/AIDS, Head Trauma, Lewy body dementia, alcohol-related dementia (Wernicke-Korsakoff syndrome) and frontotemporal dementia (Pick disease). So when you find out that your loved one is suffering from memory loss, don’t conclude that that person has Alzheimer’s. Remember that dementia is not always due to Alzheimer’s. Take the patient to a doctor for thorough evaluation and detecting early symptoms can help you to ease the condition of the sufferer.

Basically Alzheimer’s disease and Vascular Dementia are the two most common forms of dementia found in US today. They both share many common pathological, neurochemical and symptomatic features. Recently Dementia has been recognized as a continuum of pathologies in the elderly. Alzheimer’s and vascular dementia are the two extremes. There is also the ‘Mixed dementia’ that compromises majority of such cases of dementia diagnosed.