Yearly Dementia Test

Granny says, "So what, ya get old ya get goofy - what of it?...
:eusa_eh:
Mistaken for Alzheimer's, NPH, is an Often Misdiagnosed Brain Condition
March 01, 2011 | Elderly Latinos may suffer from a little-known but treatable brain condition that is often misdiagnosed as Parkinson’s or Alzheimer’s disease.
Normal pressure hydrocephalus or NPH is a condition where cerebral spinal fluid builds up in the brain’s ventricles, resulting in the afflicted person experiencing difficulty walking, dementia and loss of bladder control. Because those symptoms have similarities with more common diseases that are prevalent in old age, doctors often incorrectly diagnose NPH patients, said Phillip G. St. Louis, a neurosurgeon in Orlando, Fla.

“Most clinicians are not aware of this disorder,” said St. Louis, who is the director of the Normal Pressure Hydrocephalus Program at Florida Hospital. “So when one of their patients develops a shuffling gait or forgetfulness, they are likely to ascribe those problems to old age or alternatively Parkinson’s or Alzheimer’s.” St. Louis estimates that about 5 percent of patients diagnosed with dementia in the United States, or about 375,000 people, actually have NPH.

He said elderly Latinos have additional roadblocks that may make getting an NPH diagnosis even harder such as language barriers, lower education levels and access to quality health care services. “In the Latino community when a loved one develops these problems, their family members are less likely to see this as something they can challenge and possibly get help for and more likely to see it as just part of what it means to get old,” St. Louis said.

Read more: Mistaken for Alzheimer's, NPH, is an Often Misdiagnosed Brain Condition - Fox News Latino
 
Uncle Ferd thinks Granny needs to take a couple o' dem goofy tests...
:eusa_eh:
Dementia checks at 75 urged by Alzheimer's Society
27 March 2011 - The NHS should offer checks for dementia when people reach 75, a leading health charity says.
The Alzheimer's Society says fewer than half of those with the condition get a diagnosis, so many miss out on the care and support they need. The UK National Screening Committee, which advises the NHS, has said tests and treatments need to improve first.

And the British Medical Association says carrying out the checks would mean there is less time for other services. About 750,000 people in the UK have dementia - and with the numbers projected to rise to more than a million by 2021 the Alzheimer's Society says it is essential to identify those who need help.

'The only way'

Professor Clive Ballard, the charity's director of research, says getting a diagnosis is fundamental to ensuring the right treatment, support and care. "Really the only way we're going to improve identification is through effective screening, and probably the right time to do that screening is over the age of 75 once dementia starts to become more common."

He is proposing that people be offered a cognitive test at the GP surgery, with questions on time, date, place, memory and understanding. This would be backed up by an interview with a relative or carer. Where dementia is suspected patients would be referred to a specialist for a full clinical assessment. If they were then diagnosed with dementia, there may be drug treatment and changes in lifestyle that could help delay deterioration, and would allow an opportunity to plan ahead, he argues.

Prefer not to know
 
#3 is a trick question. Green bricks make green houses. Period. Nobody said nutthin about a house for plants. Humph.
 
We have this lady at my work who's memory lasts about five minutes. She thinks her sister is a teenager, and that her parents are alive but still scores high on the trivia and spelling part of the test they do on them to see where their dementia is at. I don't think they take in that fact some people are intelligent and that part of their memory has not been erased yet.
 
Cognitive decline linked to hearing loss...
:confused:
Straining to Hear and Fend Off Dementia
February 11, 2013, At a party the other night, a fund-raiser for a literary magazine, I found myself in conversation with a well-known author whose work I greatly admire. I use the term “conversation” loosely. I couldn’t hear a word he said. But worse, the effort I was making to hear was using up so much brain power that I completely forgot the titles of his books.
A senior moment? Maybe. (I’m 65.) But for me, it’s complicated by the fact that I have severe hearing loss, only somewhat eased by a hearing aid and cochlear implant. Dr. Frank Lin, an otolaryngologist and epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, describes this phenomenon as “cognitive load.” Cognitive overload is the way it feels. Essentially, the brain is so preoccupied with translating the sounds into words that it seems to have no processing power left to search through the storerooms of memory for a response. Over the past few years, Dr. Lin has delivered unwelcome news to those of us with hearing loss. His work looks “at the interface of hearing loss, gerontology and public health,” as he writes on his Web site. The most significant issue is the relation between hearing loss and dementia.

In a 2011 paper in The Archives of Neurology, Dr. Lin and colleagues found a strong association between the two. The researchers looked at 639 subjects, ranging in age at the beginning of the study from 36 to 90 (with the majority between 60 and 80). The subjects were part of the Baltimore Longitudinal Study of Aging. None had cognitive impairment at the beginning of the study, which followed subjects for 18 years; some had hearing loss. “Compared to individuals with normal hearing, those individuals with a mild, moderate, and severe hearing loss, respectively, had a 2-, 3- and 5-fold increased risk of developing dementia over the course of the study,” Dr. Lin wrote in an e-mail summarizing the results. The worse the hearing loss, the greater the risk of developing dementia. The correlation remained true even when age, diabetes and hypertension — other conditions associated with dementia — were ruled out.

In an interview, Dr. Lin discussed some possible explanations for the association. The first is social isolation, which may come with hearing loss, a known risk factor for dementia. Another possibility is cognitive load, and a third is some pathological process that causes both hearing loss and dementia. In a study last month, Dr. Lin and colleagues looked at 1,984 older adults beginning in 1997-8, again using a well-established database. Their findings reinforced those of the 2011 study, but also found that those with hearing loss had a “30 to 40 percent faster rate of loss of thinking and memory abilities” over a six-year period compared with people with normal hearing. Again, the worse the hearing loss, the worse the rate of cognitive decline.

Both studies also found, somewhat surprisingly, that hearing aids were “not significantly associated with lower risk” for cognitive impairment. But self-reporting of hearing-aid use is unreliable, and Dr. Lin’s next study will focus specifically on the way hearing aids are used: for how long, how frequently, how well they have been fitted, what kind of counseling the user received, what other technologies they used to supplement hearing-aid use. What about the notion of a common pathological process? In a recent paper in the journal Neurology, John Gallacher and colleagues at Cardiff University suggested the possibility of a genetic or environmental factor that could be causing both hearing loss and dementia — and perhaps not in that order. In a phenomenon called reverse causation, a degenerative pathology that leads to early dementia might prove to be a cause of hearing loss.

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Nailed it

Most of these are not original and even old farts remember them
 
Dementia costs expected to skyrocket as big medicine finds a new disease to gouge the public...
:eek:
Dementia Care Cost Is Projected to Double by 2040
April 3, 2013 > The most rigorous study to date of how much it costs to care for Americans with dementia found that the financial burden is at least as high as that of heart disease or cancer, and is probably higher. And both the costs and the number of people with dementia will more than double within 30 years, skyrocketing at a rate that rarely occurs with a chronic disease.
The research, led by an economist at the RAND Corporation, financed by the federal government, and published Wednesday in The New England Journal of Medicine, provides the most reliable basis yet for measuring the scale of the problem. Until now, the most-cited estimates of the condition’s cost and prevalence came from an advocacy group, the Alzheimer’s Association. Although some figures from the new research are lower than the association’s projections, they are nonetheless staggering and carry new gravity because they come from an academic research effort. Behind the numbers is a sense that the country, facing the aging of the baby boom generation, is unprepared for the coming surge in the cost and cases of dementia. “It’s going to swamp the system,” said Dr. Ronald C. Petersen, who is chairman of the advisory panel to the federal government’s recently created National Alzheimer’s Plan and was not involved in the RAND study.

If anything, Dr. Petersen said of the study’s numbers, “they’re being somewhat conservative.” Dr. Petersen, the director of the Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center at the Mayo Clinic, is part of another team collecting data on dementia costs. The RAND results show that nearly 15 percent of people aged 71 or older, about 3.8 million people, have dementia. By 2040, the authors said, that number will balloon to 9.1 million people. “I don’t know of any other disease predicting such a huge increase,” said Dr. Richard J. Hodes, director of the National Institute on Aging, which financed the study. “And as we have the baby boomer group maturing, there are going to be more older people with fewer children to be informal caregivers for them, which is going to intensify the problem even more.”

The study found that direct health care expenses for dementia, including nursing home care, were $109 billion in 2010. For heart disease, those costs totaled $102 billion; for cancer, $77 billion. The study also quantified the value of the sizable amount of informal care for dementia, usually provided by family members at home. That number ranged from $50 billion to $106 billion, depending on whether economists valued it by the income a family member was giving up or by what a family would have paid for a professional caregiver. Michael D. Hurd, the lead author and a principal senior researcher at RAND, said the team could find no research quantifying such informal care for heart disease and cancer. But he and other experts agree that given the intensive nature and constant monitoring required to care for people with dementia, informal costs are probably much higher than those for most other diseases.

Dr. Petersen said, “Clearly, dementia is going to outstrip those dramatically.” Without a way to prevent, cure or effectively treat these conditions yet, the bulk of the costs — 75 to 84 percent, the study found — involves helping patients in nursing homes or at home manage the most basic activities of life as they become increasingly impaired cognitively and then physically. “The long-term care costs associated with people with dementia are particularly high because of the nature of the disease,” said Donald Moulds, acting assistant secretary for planning and evaluation at the federal Department of Health and Human Services. “People eventually become incapable of caring for themselves, and then in the vast majority of cases, their loved ones become incapable of caring for them.”

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Monitoring glucose levels may help prevent dementia onset...
:cool:
Study ties higher blood sugar to dementia risk
Aug 7,`13 > Higher blood-sugar levels, even those well short of diabetes, seem to raise the risk of developing dementia, a major new study finds. Researchers say it suggests a novel way to try to prevent Alzheimer's disease - by keeping glucose at a healthy level.
Alzheimer's is by far the most common form of dementia and it's long been known that diabetes makes it more likely. The new study tracked blood sugar over time in all sorts of people - with and without diabetes - to see how it affects risk for the mind-robbing disease. The results challenge current thinking by showing that it's not just the high glucose levels of diabetes that are a concern, said the study's leader, Dr. Paul Crane of the University of Washington in Seattle. "It's a nice, clean pattern" - risk rises as blood sugar does, said Dallas Anderson, a scientist at the National Institute on Aging, the federal agency that paid for the study. "This is part of a larger picture" and adds evidence that exercising and controlling blood pressure, blood sugar and cholesterol are a viable way to delay or prevent dementia, he said.

Because so many attempts to develop effective drugs have failed, "It looks like, at the moment, sort of our best bet," Anderson said. "We have to do something. If we just do nothing and wait around till there's some kind of cocktail of pills, we could be waiting a long time." About 35 million people worldwide have dementia; in the United States, about 5 million have Alzheimer's disease. What causes it isn't known. Current treatments just temporarily ease symptoms. People who have diabetes don't make enough insulin, or their bodies don't use insulin well, to turn food into energy. That causes sugar in the blood to rise, which can damage the kidneys and other organs - possibly the brain, researchers say.

The new study, published in Thursday's New England Journal of Medicine, just tracked people and did not test whether lowering someone's blood sugar would help treat or prevent dementia. That would have to be tested in a new study, and people should not seek blood-sugar tests they wouldn't normally get otherwise, Crane said. "We don't know from a study like this whether bringing down the glucose level will prevent or somehow modify dementia," but it's always a good idea to avoid developing diabetes, he said. Eating well, exercising and controlling weight all help to keep blood sugar in line.

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“I wouldn’t advise my parents to take these medications unless they have to”...

The Cold Medicine That’s Linked to Cognitive Problems
April 18, 2016 - A common kind of prescription and over-the-counter medication, including some cold medicines, has been linked to cognitive impairment in older adults, finds a new study published in JAMA Neurology.
Shannon Risacher, assistant professor of radiology and imaging sciences at Indiana University School of Medicine and first author of the new paper, and her colleagues analyzed already existing data from 451 people around ages 70-75 who had normal brains. They examined the results of memory tests, MRI brain scans and other neuroimaging data—all while paying particular attention to people who said they took anticholinergic drugs. These include certain over-the-counter drugs, like Benadryl, Tylenol PM and Advil PM, according to the researcher, along with prescribed medications like some antidepressants, motion sickness medications and bladder control drugs. Anticholinergic drugs block the neurotransmitter acetylcholine in the brain.

The researchers found that older people who regularly took at least one anticholinergic drug showed poorer cognition, lower brain volumes and less glucose metabolism in the whole brain and the temporal lobe, which is important for memory, than people who didn’t report taking this kind of medications. The link persisted even after the team controlled for the number of medications the people in the study were taking.

Previous research has linked anticholinergic medications to cognitive impairment and worsened memory, the paper points out. More research is needed to determine exactly how these effects might be linked to the drug, and what dosage and duration may be associated with brain changes.

“I certainly wouldn’t advise my grandparents or even my parents to take these medications unless they have to,” says Risacher. Many anticholinergic drugs, like antihistamines and antidepressants, have alternatives. “I’d suggest that doctors monitor medications and their effects, and to use the lowest dose that’s effective.”

The Cold Medicine That's Linked to Cognitive Problems
 

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