The number one risk factor for Alzheimer's disease is age, far more than genetics. Because of the aging of the U.S. population, there are currently 6.7 million Americans with dementia, including Alzheimer's.
that impacts an individual with dementia but also the prevalent behavioral symptoms of dementia such as depression, anxiety, and agitation that drive the burden of the illness and impacts quality of life for the individual with dementia and their family," says Forester."Unfortunately, ouris not structured to recognize this illness early or to manage the holistic dementia care that patients and families desperately need.
"Similar to dementia care, individuals with depression, anxiety, and substance use disorders are predominantly treated within the primary care medical setting. It is through integration of behavioral health care with the rest of medicine that our patients will receive access to the mental health care they need," Forester says.
Brent Forester: With normal aging, processing speed slows, and it might take longer to accomplish certain tasks. From a memory perspective, you might experience the tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon where you're trying to come up with the name of an actor or movie. The information is not lost, it just takes longer to come out. That is a memory retrieval problem we sometimes see in normal aging.
When an individual has a cognitive deficit in one of those domains—a decline from their norm based on age and education—and they're functioning normally, we call that mild cognitive impairment. It doesn't mean the cognitive decline is caused by a stroke or Alzheimer's disease or something else—it's a clinical syndrome. The next step is to determine the cause of the mild cognitive impairment syndrome.
There are many causes of cognitive problems that may not be dementia. In addition to collecting symptoms and functioning, physicians need to make sure there's no other medical problem—such as infection, heart disease, diabetes, medication side effects, or mental illness like depression or anxiety—causing those cognitive and functional changes.and neurofibrillary tangles that build up in the brain and cause healthy brain matter to shrink. This is called brain atrophy.
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