Common Signs Of Dementia

With 55 million people with dementia worldwide, it will not be wide of the mark to say that it is a relatively common disease, especially for people aged 60 or above. However, despite it being so common, people often have a miscalculated definition of what it means. 

Dementia, rather than being a disease itself, is a word used to define a group of symptoms that affect a person’s memory, thinking, social abilities, and communication. Several diseases can leave a person with dementia, sometimes severe enough to impact their daily lives and activities.

Symptoms

Though memory loss and dementia are often co-related, it is not that a person suffering from memory loss necessarily has dementia. Instead, memory problems can be caused due to several reasons and health conditions, dementia being one of them. 

Furthermore, a dementia diagnosis requires a person to show at least two severe impairments that affect their daily life. Let us look at some common symptoms –

Changing Moods

It is not uncommon to have mood swings, but a rather drastic mood shift is also a common symptom of dementia, depression being a good example. For a person with dementia, the shift may not be apparent, but it is very much so for others near them. 

Moreover, since dementia also often affects judgment, personality shift besides mood swings is also an early sign.

Indifference And Difficulty Communicating

Loss of interest in matters a person once found quite intriguing and fun is every day in dementia. Apart from activities and hobbies, the person may also develop apathy towards their own family and friends with an unwillingness to go outdoors. In short, developing an emotionally numb nature. 

Difficulty in communication, whether it is not being able to find the right word, forgetting mid-way what they were addressing, or just loss of interest, is another common sign of dementia. It makes conversing with a person with dementia rather hard to follow and extended.   

Short Term Memory And Confusion

Memory loss and changes are early signs of dementia, but they do not always include significant effects. For example, forgetting subtle details like what they had for lunch, where they kept a particular item, etc., while remembering something from years ago is also one of many different forms of dementia. 

The same can also trigger confusion in the person, which then extends to a lapse in judgment, thinking, and memory. In severe cases, the symptoms will grow further than just troubled interaction or confusion and include a hard time remembering faces. 

Trouble Completing Usual And Familiar Tasks

Dementia often, besides social life, also interferes with the person’s personal life, including his ability to do regular day-to-day chores. This early sign of dementia begins subtly through the inability to handle complex events such as doing calculations, playing games like chess, or those with several rules, etc.

And, of course, this difficulty follows through in the new chores they are trying to learn, like playing a new game, learning a new trick, or just following a new schedule.