Dementia

Dementia

Context :

• According to a 2020 report, there are around five million people in India living with dementia.
• Worldwide, 47.5 million people have dementia, and up to 135.5 million could by 2050.

What is Dementia?

• Dementia is a clinical syndrome caused by a range of diseases or injuries to the brain.

• The most common cause of dementia is Alzheimer’s disease, which is implicated in up to 70% of dementia diagnoses.

Symptoms :

• Early symptoms include absent­mindedness, difficulty recalling names and words, difficulty retaining new information, disorientation in unfamiliar surroundings, and reduced social engagement.

Signs and symptoms of Dementia

• Atypical symptoms include impairment in recognising visually presented objects despite a normal visual field, acuity and colour vision.
• Some might also experience word­finding difficulties.
• As the disease progresses, there is a marked memory loss and loss of other cognitive skills, including reduced vocabulary and less complex speech patterns.
• This may be accompanied by mood swings, apathy, a decline in social skills, and the emergence of psychotic phenomena.
• Advanced disease is characterised by monosyllabic speech, psychotic symptoms, behavioural disturbance, loss of bladder and bowel control, and reduced mobility.

How to prevent Dementia?

• The WHO has identified preventing Alzheimer’s disease to be key to fighting the world’s dementia epidemic.
• Economic analyses have found that delaying the onset of the disease by even one year could reduce its prevalence by 11%.
• Prevention programmes usually focus on lifestyle risk factors together with mental well­being and risk of cardiovascular diseases.
• Regular exercise helps offset cardiovascular health risks and improves cerebral perfusion, synaptic function, and stimulates the growth of new brain cells in the hippocampus.

Who are more vulnerable?

• At least two large studies, in 1996 and 2009, have demonstrated a strong relationship between mid­life hypertension and dementia in later life.
• Current smokers have a 50% higher risk of developing dementia relative to those who have never smoked.
• Smoking cessation is known to reduce the risk to the level of never-smokers.
• There is also a robust link between depression in late life and the incidence of sporadic dementia. Having depression almost doubles the risk of developing dementia.

Treatment of Dementia :

• Dementia care has four pillars.
• The first two include managing the important aspects of the disease, with a goal to reverse their effects or to delay its progression in the brain as well as managing the cognitive, neuropsychiatric, and functional symptoms.
• The other two pillars involve providing systematic, evidence-based supportive care to patients and to carers.

Way forward :

We will need a cultural transition moving from dementia to a framework of brain health will destigmatise cognitive decline, empower people to take more responsibility towards prevention, and encourage society to adopt inclusive solutions to maintain functional independence.

SOURCE : THE HINDU

Syllabus : GS3 – Health; Diseases