Intro to dementia Flashcards
What is dementia
- Cognitive failure
- deterioration in day to day function
- Evidence of long term progression
What are the symptoms of dementia
- Cognitive failure
- forgetting things
- difficulties with day to day function
- Hallucinations (dementia lewy bodies)
What are the different types of dementia
- Alzheimer’s
- Dementia with Lewy bodies
- Mixed dementia (mixed alzheimer’s/vascular)
- Vascular dementia
- Fronto-temporal dementia
What happens to memroy and neurological structure in normal ageing?
- occasional memory lapse
- Word finding difficulty
- Planning intact
- Degree of brain atrophy: the ventricles increase in size; the gyri are much thinner in the older brain; the sulci are much deeper and more prominent in the older brain
- Degree of brain pathology
Outline the cognitive domains that could be affected in dementia
- Memory
- Thinking
- Orientation
- Calculation
- Learning
- Language
- Judgement
What is perception
- recognition of sensory info
- representation of sensory info
Outline cognitive failure in dementia
- Pattern of cognitive failure is linked to distribution of brain& neurotransmitter dysfunction in early stages
- Regional and global brain atrophy occurs in later stages
Outline memory deficit(amnesia) in dementia
- Recent events
- New info
- Recall impaired
- Long term better
- Motor memory may remain intact until advanced disease (piano playing/artistic skills preserved to the very late stages as it’s a different kind of memory that is lost)
Outline aphasia in dementia
- Language deficit
- Simplified use of language
- Less use of abstract and descriptive terms
- Word finding problems
- Naming difficulties
- Receptive problems
- Complete loss of communication
Outline higher motor function (apraxia) in dementia
-Inability to perform acts of ones own will despite intact motor and sensory systems
-Dressing
-Eating
-Constructional (drawing)
-Ideomotor (wave goodbye)
(in dementia you don’t get involvement of the primary motor/sensory cortex)
Outline perceptual deficit (agnosia) in dementia
- Inability to understand the significance of sensory stimuli
- Misidentification of object by feel
- Misidentification of faces (propsoagnosia)
- R-L disorientation
- Unable to recognise own body parts
What is a key clinical hallmark of dementia with Lewy bodies
-Visual hallucinations
Outline the tests of global cognition
- )MMSE( Mini-Mental State Examination)
- 30-point questionnaire that is used extensively in clinical and research settings to measure cognitive impairment - )ACE-R (Addenbrooke’s Cognitive Examination)
What can dementia cause beyond cognition?
- Neuropsychiatric symptoms
- Behavioural and psychological symptoms of dementia (BPSD)
Outline the neuropsychiatric symptoms of dementia
- Hallucinations (particularly dementia with lewy bodies)
- Delusions
- Depression
- Anxiety
- Apathy
- Behavioural disturbance-shouting,pacing
- Eating preference
- Sexual disinhibition
- Sleep behaviours