Dementia

1. Dementia

2. What is Dementia? • Dementia is a gradual decline of mental ability that affects your intellectual and social skills to the point where daily life becomes difficult. • Dementia can affect your memory and your decision-making ability, can impair your judgment and make you feel disoriented, and it may also affect your personality.

3. Types of Dementia • There are many symptoms that lead to dementia but we will cover these 5 types: • Alzheimer’s disease • Vascular dementia • Dementia with Lewy bodies • Lewy Bodies is a combination of Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. • Frontal-temporal dementia • Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease

4. Alzheimer’s & Dementia • Alzheimer’s is the most common form of Dementia • Dementia is not an acute condition that suddenly appears and it usually does not require emergency treatment.

5. Causes of Dementia • alcoholism • brain injury • drug abuse • side effects to certain medications • In some cases of dementia it may be reversible once the underlying cause has been treated.

6. Aging and a family history of dementia are risk factors for developing dementia. The following factors can also add to the risk of developing dementia: • high blood pressure • high cholesterol • diabetes • smoking • Unfortunately, when dementia is caused by conditions such as Alzheimer's disease, brain injury, or simply aging (senile dementia), the changes that occur are irreversible.

7. Alzheimer’s Disease • See notes that you already have.

8. Vascular Dementia • Is commonly referred to as multi infarct dementia. • Infarction is tissue death caused by blockage of the tissue’s blood supply. • This type of dementia is the result of brain damage either due to large or small strokes, or to chronically low blood supply to the brain.

9. Vascular Dementia Continued • Often, a person with vascular dementia experiences a more sudden loss of memory and function as compared to a person with Alzheimer's disease.

10. Dementia with Lewy Bodies • Dementia with Lewy Bodies is one of the more common forms of dementia and can affect as many as one in ten people with dementia. • Lewy bodies appear in neurons which are breaking down. • When these Lewy bodies are in deep regions of the brain that affect control of movement, this causes Parkinson’s disease.

11. Lewy Bodies continued • When compared to Alzheimer’s Lewy Bodies does not follow a progression in steps. • Example: In Alzheimer’s, hallucinations generally occur in the later stages. • In comparison with Lewy Bodies Dementia, hallucinations can occur at any stage at random, there are symptoms that precede the hallucinations.

12. Frontal Temporal Dementia • Affects personality and speech but not memory.

13. Frontal Temporal Dementia • How does this one differ from other types of dementia? • Unlike most other forms of dementia, memory is not affected in people with this type of dementia until later in the disease. • The disease mainly affects different parts of the brain than are affected by other forms of dementia: the frontal and temporal lobes. • Also, this form of dementia strikes people at a relatively younger age -- usually between the ages of 40 and 60.

14. Frontal Temporal Disease • Sometimes referred to as Picks Disease. • These picks (abnormal proteins) disrupt normal brain cell functions. • Nearly half of all individuals with Frontal Temporal Disease have family history of the disease.

15. Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease • Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD) is a rare, rapid and fatal disease of the central nervous system. • Death often occurs within 6-12 months of diagnosis • This disease is thought to be caused by Prions, which are particles that change our body's proteins into infectious deadly proteins, which results in brain death.