Biology behind: Dementia.





Greetings everyone,


Today marks a marvellous day because it is the second post of the new series 'Biology Behind' every other week we will take a theory, a disease, or a natural phenomenon and look at how biology drives it into being! so without further a dew we give to you today's post...



In the UK there are approximately 700,000 people out of a population of 61 million who are diagnosed with dementia, and it was found that more than 70 diseases/disorders are associated with this condition.

 

Post highlight: Did you know that Dementia is actually not a disease in itself such as Alzheimer's, it is in fact diseases that can eventually lead to dementia!


Like most conditions, dementia is pretty hard to define however we found one that seemed to be widely accepted. Dementia is thought to be a progressive deterioration in cognitive function, more than what is expected to be from normal aging and is due to damage or disease. 
The symptoms that are associated with dementia are split into two different categories
  1. Cognitive symptoms: impairments in language, praxis, judgement, visuospatial function and related mental activities.
  2.  Non-cognitive symptoms: disturbance in behaviour, mood, belief and experience (hallucinations).


Now that we have outlined the symptoms that come with dementia, it is important to note that although dementia is a development from other diseases there are 'types' of dementia.

So, we know that dementia is not a disease but caused by a disease, we know that when talking about the symptoms of dementia that we can break it down into two separate categories, no we move onto what factors or diseases can lead to dementia. 


Alzheimer's disease: unsurprisingly, this is the most common cause of dementia. The chemistry and structure of the brain in an Alzheimer's patient changes and their brain cells begin to die prematurely.






Stroke (vascular problems): this is as a cause with problems of the blood vessels. All blood vessels leading to the brain are extremely important as the brain needs a rich and continuous supply of oxygen and when interrupted brain cells begin to die causing vascular dementia.





Dementia with Lewy bodies: this is where tiny spherical clusters of protein build up within the nerve cell, thereby affecting chemical signalling between one nerve cell and the next. It affects the patients memory, concentration and ability to speak, it is also often mistaken for Parkinson's Disease.







Frontotemporal dementia: this dementia includes Picks disease (this is considered to be a progressive form of dementia involving localised atrophy of the brain.) In this form the front part of the brain is damaged which in the short term affects behaviour and personality and then later on the memory starts to become affected.






Other diseases that can lead to dementia are: progressive supra nuclear palsy; Korsakoffs syndrome; Binswangers disease; HIV and AID's and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease; common Parkinson's disease; Huntington's disease; Motor Neurone disease and Multiple Sclerosis. People with high blood glucose levels have a higher risk of dementia even without diabetes.



This brings us to the end of our post! we hope that you enjoyed this post and make sure that you visit our blog again on Wednesday for the animal of the week wondering what it is well you are going to have to come back and see! And we will leave you with this fact it has been proven that being by lingual or having the ability to speak  another language other than your own could help in preventing dementia.Well in that case...


@Biobunch.
Cambio y fuera!




2 comments

  1. Let me briefly tell you that there are multiple forms of dementia - alzheimer’s disease being the most common one that accounts for 40 to 75% of dementia cases and is the sixth leading cause of death in United States. Additionally, dementia and its types have common signs with some variations. Let’s start with the most common signs of dementia most commonly seen in patients at the early stages of the disease. They start experiencing subtle memory loss, mood instability such as immediate occurrences of maniac (laugh) and depression (sadness) episodes, and have trouble with listening and explaining things to other people, communicational obstructions to be exact. They also segregate their selves from social gatherings and unions, face difficulty in performing daily chores and also experience muscle impairment. Additionally, some people fail to converse with other people because they fail to keep up the pace and comparatively take longer to process the coming words and repeat the same question over and over again. Most of the cases showed that, dementia patients start segregating their selves and start living alone because they could not keep up with the lives of normal people. They just are not up for the adaptation to change. In one of the form of dementia, which is Lewy Body dementia, probable signs appear to be sleeplessness. Patients experience insomnia which leads to mood swings. It has been seen that they fail to keep tracks of roads and lose their tracking skills as well. In case of Alzheimer’s, a patient the most common signs are memory loss and forgetfulness. In some cases, it has been observed that people with Alzheimer’s segregate their selves from others. Additionally, they experience complete memory loss and trouble understanding visual images and spatial relationships, lack the judgement skill and a complete withdrawal from work or social activities. One most commonly observed is the forgetfulness and inability to retrace steps. There is another type of dementia called Parkinson’s characterized as uncontrollable movement of body parts such a shaking limbs and fingers. It has been observed that patients experience writing and speech changes, their ability to respond fails badly and they lose posture and balance. One of the common sign is bradykinesia characterized as slow body movement. One thing to keep in mind before labelling someone as a dementia patient is that forgetfulness and memory loss do no really mean a person has dementia because memory loss and forgetfulness are a normal parts of aging. But if any severity has been observed in these signs, a patient definitely requires a professional advice and consultation. There is no cookie approach to cure dementia but if you observe such changings or signs in your loved ones do not take it for granted before it gets too late.
    Reference: What IS Dementia?

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  2. Great tips regrading dementia . You provided the best information which helps us a lot. Thanks for sharing the wonderful information.

    ReplyDelete

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