Senile Dementia

Dementia occurs with the decreasing of memory capacity and of another cognitive capacity, that leads to a worsening of social and working features.

The word "senile dementia" indicates a syndrome, that is a set of symptoms leading to an impairment of some functions such as: cognitive (memory, reasoning, language, orientiring ability, performing complex exercises); personality alteration (anxiety, depression, delirious conception, nervousness, verbal aggressiveness); behaviour alteration (insomnia, apathy, ripetitive behaviour, appetite loss, and alteration of sexual behaviour). Therefore, it leads to a progressive impoverishment of mental abilities resulting from a disease and not from the natural aging process.

It affects almost the 5% of people over the age of 65, and the 30% of the over 85 people.

There are several causes of dementia:

• Alzheimer's disease, in 50-75% of cases
• Multiple lesions to brain due to cerebral ischemia, in 10% of cases (vascular ischemic dementia)
• Alzheimer's disease in conjunction with cerebral ischemia, in 10% of cases (mixed dementia)
• Degenerative diseases of the brain, in 15-20% of cases (Pick's disease, Lewy bodies, and others)
• Several curable diseases in 10-15% of cases (such as endocrine disorders, drepession, drugs, and others)

Clinically there are two types of dementia:

• Cortical dementia: it features an extended cortical atrophy, a precocius memory impairment, and after a while abstract thought loss, agnosia, aphasia, apraxia (like in Alzheimer's disease)
• Subcortical dementia: it features a more precocius slowdown of cognitive precesses and a lower memory loss than cortical one, but it leads to pesonality alteration, apathy, and mobilty slowdown.

Yet, practically this is a too strict and rigid classification. The most used is an ethiopathogenetic classification. So it can be distinguished:

• Primary dementia, such as Alzheimer's diesease, Pick's disease, progressive primary aphasy, and other less common types of aphasy.
• Dementia associated to primary neuronal degeneration, such as Parkinson's disease, Hungtington's disease, and other types of extrapiramidal syndromes
• Vascular dementia
• Dementia caused by prions
• Dementia caused by endocrine-methabolic disorders (such as thyroid disorders, liver disorders, renal failure)
• Dementia caused by deficiencies ( Korsakoff-Wernicke syndorme, pellagra, vitamin B12 deficiency, etc.)
• Dementia caused by organic diseases (such as tumors, injuries, multiple sclerosis)
• Dementia caused by infections (such as AIDS, Whipple's disease)

                                  Articles from Wikipedia, Aging.com




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