What Nigerians need to know about Alzheimer “dementia” diseases and how they can provide the elderly with early intervention with a functional approach.
Many Nigeria age parent suffered from dementia which prompt mistreatment from society. Dementia is a neurologically degenerative condition and we tagged them with witches or wizards because of our ignorance about how Alzheimer diseases impact memory and progressively causes cognitive difficulties.
Dementia is an age-related disease just like a stroke, cancer and coronary artery disease.
dementia is classified as mental incompetency causing the suffers to depend on people for decision making and cognitive support. Nigeria culture, view or made belief of how Nigerians treat parent with dementia is an assumption that should be eliminated.
Dementia syndrome is a decline in memory and thinking (cognition) or can be categorized as a disease leading to impairment of individual, group and work-related undertaking.
Cognitive and Psychological changes
- Calculating the ability
- Learning capacity
- Information processing
- Inability to manage finance
- Change in personality: apathy or irritability
- Memory deficit
- Symptoms of depression
- Disregard for social activities
- mystification and awkwardness
- put out of order
- Hallucination and anxiety
Stages Of Dementia and how it progressively shift from mild memory impairment
Overlap stages of dementia: EARLY, MILD, MIDDLE, MODERATE, SEVERE
- Pre-dementia stage: neither sick nor experience symptoms, but they experience mild cognitive impairment.
- Experience of extreme soft signs of cognitive breakdown
- Signs progressively shift from mild to the middle.
- restrained cognitive turndown
- fairly severe signs of cognitive breakdown
- Total cognitive decline
- Severe dementia and that is when you might need to move them to care home for adequate support.
Neuropsychological appearance causing complications and leading to dementia impairment
Even though is very hard to identify dementia stages, just as there is no consensus for any kind of mental illness, what are the clinical diagnosis and manifestation of dementia? Neuropsychological evaluation, also called neuropsychological testing, is an in-depth assessment of skills and abilities linked to brain function. The evaluation measures such areas as attention, problem-solving, memory, language, I.Q., visual-spatial skills, academic skills, and social-emotional functioning.
most dementia are currently irreversible, but they are manageable. Nigerians can help their parents manage dementia with functional approach? Dementia causes functional consequences and result in inability to manage daily lives, so the
- the first step is awareness of early symptoms in our parent and involvement in their treatment and always ready to provide them with appropriate effective treatment
- A good relationship with the team caring for them
- Interdisciplinary relationships
- Environmental manipulation
Our parents are not witches or wizards, they suffered dementia, let us put our collective efforts together to carter for them. Oluseyi Elizabeth Odudimu