Understanding Dementia

Nishi Pulugurtha writes about the challenges of being a caregiver to an Alzheimer’s patient, her mother, and the travails that came with it. “Let us go home,” Amma said this often. There was nothing strange about this sentence, all of us would love to be back home at some point of time or other. What makes Amma’s statement important is that when she said this, she was actually at home. I used to tell her that. It made her keep quiet for a while. She would go back to doing something. It was…

Swapna Kishore, a dementia resource person, talks to Dr. CT Sudhir Kumar on the importance of getting a dementia diagnosis and not treating it as a normal ageing process, how to select the right doctor, how to plan for a doctor consultation, the tests that the doctor may prescribe and how to plan reviews with your doctor.   When someone shows symptoms like memory problems, confusion, unclear speech, inability to plan, or strange behaviour, we may wonder whether this is dementia and…

Mausumi Ghosh from Mumbai talks about the travails of taking care of her mother, 77 who suffers from dementia in addition to other conditions like osteosporosis. My mother is an osteoporosis patient from 2003 when she underwent hip replacement operation in Mumbai. She recovered from the same very well and was mobile and independent till she met with a ‘fall’ at home in 2010 and broke her ‘femur bone’ (left leg). She got herself operated twice in Kolkata in AMRI hospital and both the times the ‘…

Caregivers of persons with dementia are often unsure how to talk about the loss of a family member or friend. Porrselvi A.P., a cognitive and psychosocial interventions specialist shares tips on how to break the news and how to help the person with dementia deal with the news. Supporting a person with dementia who is grieving the death of someone close to them cope with the loss is challenging for many caregivers. Often, in the daily grind of caring for a person with dementia we forget that…

Symptoms like weight loss, memory loss, weakness, and fatigue should not be mistaken as a sign of the"normal aging" process. Dr. Shital Patel explains 12 common but misleading symptoms in the elderly and why you should seek a doctor's opinion instead of ignoring them.  Symptoms in the elderly can have very different causes than they may have in a young person. Many symptoms in the geriatric population may be masked by concurrent chronic ailments, injuries, age-related physiological…

People with moderate stage dementia can continue to perform their regular daily activities with a little bit of support. Social worker Mangala Joglekar, who runs several programs for the dementia community and has set-up the Memory Clinic in Deenanath Mangeshkar Hospital, Pune, shares 5 examples of coping strategies for better living. And Advice for Caregivers. Moderate stage dementia could be said to start when cognitive inabilities can no longer be hidden. It is considered as the longest…

After a stroke nearly 20-40 per cent patients develop communication problems or aphasia, the inability to comprehend and formulate language because of damage to specific language areas in the brain. Dr Sujata Gandhi, Speech Therapist, Nanavati Hospital, advises that speech and language therapy is the best way to restore normalcy and quality of life. How does a stroke or ‘brain attack’ affect speech and communication? A stroke causes damage to the Speech and Language areas of the brain. For most…

Talking and writing about health related experiences is still not common in Asia.  This International Women’s Day, we reach out to three dynamic women who share their experience as patient or caregiver to understand their motivations. We kick off the first in a three-part series with Sangeeta Murthi Sahgal.  1)    Your father had Parkinson's Disease. Why did you choose to talk and share about your father's condition? When I took over my father's care-giving, I researched the…

Ms. Malavika M. Nair and Ms. Aakriti Vig under the guidance of DEMCARES, SCARF India write about the stressors that lead to challenging behaviours of Dementia and how to handle them.   Dementia is recognized as a global health concern. It is estimated that nearly 47.5 million of the global population is diagnosed with dementia (WHO, 2017). It is a neurocognitive disorder, which is primarily prevalent in the elderly population. The symptoms include significant memory loss with…

Brain exercises are among the most effective non-medical approaches to delay the onset of dementia and can be enjoyable for the patient and more likely to be complied, emphasises Sabah Thaver, senior physical therapist (neurorehabilitation) at Nanavati Hospital. Mark Twain once famously said, “Out of all the things I have lost, I miss my mind the most.” This line at first sounds humorous, but it turns out to be the bitter truth of the lives of those living with conditions like Dementia. People…