Dementia Flashcards
What is dementia?
Dementia is umbrella term for symptoms like memory loss, confusion and personality changes. It is caused by a number of diseases (e.g. alzheimers). It is syndrome defined as decline in daily in daily functioning due to cognitive impairment
What are risk factors for dementia?
- Age
- Obesity
- smoking
- diabetes
- Vascular health status
- Low educational attainment
- Having one of the causing diseases (alzheimer’s, frontotemporal dementia, vascular dementia, dementia with lewy bodies…)
Who may be affected to this disease?
Eldery people. An estimated 40 million people older than 60 years have dementia.
What is basic mechanism of dementia?
- Region specific neuronal loss
- Accumulation of specific pathological proteins (e.g. alpha-synuclein in dementia with lewy bodies) -> protein misfolding
- Vascular pathologies: one or many infarcts in strategic brain areas
- Cerebrovascular dysfunction
- Vascular dementia is caused by disease or trauma affecting the blood supply to the brain
- Dementia with lewy bodies (accumulation of alpha-synuclein and neurites in substantia nigra, cortex and limbic areas)
- Mutation in TAU gene
How is dementia diagnosed?
Clinical diagnosis of any dementia syndrome depends on taking a history from the patient and their carers, neuropsychological testing and assessment of symptoms (e.g. changes in behavior over time, aggressiveness, visual hallucinations, parkinsonism, progressive cognitive failure..)
Treatment of Dementia?
Four drugs are used for the treatment:
1) Cholinoesterase inhibitors (donepezil, rivastigme, galantamine). These tend to stabilize cognitive performance and daily functioning during the first years (ACh inhibitor)
2) Glutamate antagonist (memantine)
Is dementia inherited?
Majority is not inherited. 40% of FTD is inherited (positive family history) and it is autosomally dominant. C9ofr71 is one causative gene.
