DEMENTIA

	D
	DEMENTIA
	*DEMENTIA*

DEMENTIA

Dementia

Within the dementia concept they include manifold diseases of diverse causes.

All of them by an acquired with time, progressive and irreversible deterioration are characterized, of all the intellectual functions and the personality; which affects the memory, to the language, to the attention, in the opinion, to the reasoning capacity and therefore it produces disturbances of the social conduct.

We can say that it is a set of chronic diseases that evolve in a period like minimum of months, being discovered east deterioration often of fortuitous form since the patient is little conscious of it.

Prognosis

It is not good.

Therapies do not exist that help to cure these alterations (safe in some secondary dementias to other processes, that yes have effective treatments and, therefore, treatment or halting of the deterioration); reason why the degree of worsening of the patient is every greater time.

Causes

The dementias can be differentiated between secondary and primary according to they are product of another disease or no.

Between the primary ones it emphasizes, by its frequency, the disease of Alzheimer on whose cause it is being investigated intensely at the present time.

Signs and symptoms

Most frequent of all the dementias it is the disease of Alzheimer, to which formerly dementia was denominated to him presenil(reservando itself the term of senile dementia for which it appeared after the 65 years).

This disease appears in greater people with a slow and progressive course.

Generally, one begins with disturbances of the recent memory, being frequent that the subject cannot repeat some word that has read or heard few minutes before, although has perfectly conserved the memory of the old facts. This deficit makes him lose the usual objects or forget where it has kept them.

With the passage of time this alteration of the memory is become more noticeable, affecting longer periods, always from the present towards the past.

Later disorientation in the time and the space takes place, with ignorance of the date or the impossibility to orient itself later in little frequent places and in familiar places, getting even to not know its own room.

They present/display alterations of the language, being characteristic that do not finish the phrases or are entrecortadas with silencios, giving generally answers that do not correspond with the question. All it causes that with time they present/display difficulties to develop the habitual activities, getting after many years to depend totally on another person.

The second more frequent group of dementias is due to diseases the brain-vasculares (to see accident cerebrovascular)

Factors of riesgo/Prevención

When the unknown the origin of most of the dementias, it is difficult to determine which are the risk factors and how to prevent them, although in the secondary dementias, like cerebrovasculares (to see accident cerebrovascular) yes that it is possible to act on the underlying causes in most of the cases.

Diagnosis and treatment

DIAGNOSIS:

The diagnosis is made by the sintomatología, that usually is progressive: that is to say, the patient penetrates in the dementia in the time, not of immediate form.

In any case analyses of blood, electroencefalogramas, T.A.C are due to make. and other tests in certain cases to discard some of the secondary dementias.

TREATMENT:

The treatment, rehabilitador, try to force mainly to the patient to that it makes an effort his brain, in motor exercises and of memory, that allow to delay the appearance him of certain symptoms.

When existing many types of dementias and pseudodementias, these patients must be valued by a specialist since effective treatments for some of them exist.

These treatments must be restored as rapidly as possible in the evolution of the disease.

Thus, we can say that some dementias can be treated specifically, like due the a:

chronic infections like sífilis

vitamin deficit

hormonal problems or alterations of the circulation of the cefalorraquídeo liquid (that is the liquid that the central nervous system made up of the brain bathes, the trunk of encéfalo and the spinal marrow).

In the case of the dementias for which a specific treatment does not exist, yes palliative treatments exist (that diminish or eliminate the most annoying or incapacitantes symptoms), that is worth the trouble to apply.

It is essential the support to the patient and its family since it is a problem that overflows the strictly sanitary scope becoming a social problem.

Complications

The derived ones from a person who cannot be worth by itself, neither to go out, nor to get dressed, nor to remember nothing.

The natural evolution of the disease of Alzheimer takes to the patients to be bed-ridden, with the possibility of undergoing sores that become infected secondarily.

They can get to undergo upheavals of the swallowing (difficulties to swallow), which takes to states of extreme undernourishment and possibilities to them of neumonía (pulmonary inflammation) by aspiration of the gastric content; frequently very serious.

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