Elder Population and Dementia

One of the major illnesses that are effecting our elderly population is the illness of dementia, or cognitive impairment. According to the Webster dictionary dementia is “a mental illness that causes someone to be unable to think clearly or to understand what is real and what is not real”. In reality dementia is so much more than this, it is more clearly defined on the Alzheimer’s Association website, “ Dementia is not a specific disease. It’s an overall term that describes a wide range of symptoms associated with a decline in memory or other thinking skills severe enough to reduce a person’s ability to perform everyday activities”. Dementia is most commonly seen in those who are over the age of 60, and the older a person gets the higher their risk of developing dementia becomes.

Since dementia is such wide array of illnesses there are many different diagnostic symptoms that can point to dementia. Symptoms can vary greatly but they are mostly on the track of inability to use different brain functions. Different brain functions that can be impaired when looking at dementia are memory, language, ability to focus, reasoning, judgment, or visual perception. People who suffer from dementia also struggle with short term memory loss. They do not remember the little things like where their car keys are or if they ate breakfast that day. This would be where the symptoms start, because the symptoms of dementia start off rather slow but they gradually worsen over time. “Dementia is caused by damage to brain cells” (Alzheimer’s Association 2014). When the cells are damaged in a specific region of the brain this causes the brain cells to not be able to communicate with one another, these specific regions of the brains each carry out different ...

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...e run to determine if it is dementia. Although it is fairly easy for the doctor to determine if the patient does have dementia, it is extremely difficult to determine what type of dementia it is because the symptoms that the patient is experiencing are constantly changing. The most common type of dementia is Alzheimer’s.

Dementia is a degenerative disease, for the most part it is permanent and irreversible. Although there is no cure for dementia there are a number of different medications that doctors can prescribe to help the patient. These medications will not fix the symptoms completely but they will help to improve the patient’s life style the best possible. These medications that can be used to treat the symptoms of dementia are antidepressants, antiolytics, or antipsychotics. A list of these medications includes methylphenidate, risperidone, and imipramine.