Essay On Dementia

Dementia: What’s in a Memory?

Introduction

Dementia is an all-inclusive term for cognitive impairment that interferes with attention to daily living and quality of life. This term does not refer to forgetting your car keys or turning off a light. It refers to mild, moderate or severe cognitive impairments. As our population ages our lifespan increases, as of 2012 life expectancy is 78.8 years (Center for Disease Control and Prevention, 2015). At a cost of $34 billion every year, as well as to our society in health care resources, insurance, loss of productivity and not to mention the emotional toll. Dementia is an insidious disease that is not part of the normal aging process (CDC, 2015). Dementia, according to the American Psychiatric

As well as distinct difficulty in the domains of disturbance of executive function, object recognition, language, and motor activity– the ability to plan, organize, and being nonfigurative. Dementia is a disease of older adults, which suggests that as successive cohorts of our population live longer, the determination to better address dementia increases (CDC, 2013). Dementia is the loss of cognitive operations, or the loss of behavioral abilities; the ability to remember, or think, as well as an individual’s ability to reason. When this loss occurs, it interferes with a person’s daily life and activities. These symptoms of dementia are the consequence of once-healthy neurons (nerve cells) in the brain stop working, lose communication with other brain cells, and die. We all lose some neurons as we age, but people with dementia experience a greater loss of neurons (CDC, 2015).

Severe memory impairment is not as simple as losing your keys. It has distinctions that include the inability to dress or feed our self, talk, but more importantly the lack of self-cognition, in other words, we do not recognize we are experiencing

Compared to basic self-care tasks (e.g., feeding, dressing, transferring, toileting, and bathing). IADL is self-report and informant that become the basis of assessment and diagnosis. However, both methods are limited in sensitivity for capturing more distinctive performance problems. More explicitly, self-report typically provide a general precision score replicating a participant’s capacity in one or more IADL domains (e.g. finances, medication management). While informant-reported refers to whether an individual is capable of completing a task (e.g., shopping) either by themselves or with some help. Improved sensitivity to ability would give a better understanding of the course of practical change between aging and