Over 5 million Americans have been diagnosed with dementia. Dementia is often found in elderly people as a harmful side effect of some mental illness, such as Alzheimer’s, and might reflect as an after-effect of a medical treatment.
A common misconception about dementia is that it is described wrongly as a disease. It actually consists of dementia symptoms of a functional disorder and is not a disease in itself.
It is definitely not an easy task to provide home care for dementia going by the nature of dementia and its various symptoms. So understanding dementia symptoms and its three stages in the progress of dementia helps prepare you and your family for the changes to come.
In the first stage, the sufferer has a marked deterioration of memory, impaired concentration and an increasing tendency to fatigue and anxiety. Speech disorders in the early stages are usually limited to occasional difficulty in word-finding. Handwriting may be noticeably altered.
In the second stage there is a further deterioration, which is particularly evident around practical everyday skills. At this stage the home begins to take on an air of squalor as the sufferer is no longer able to use the washing machine and the vacuum cleaner.
Dressing can become increasingly difficult, with garments put on back to front, a right arm inserted into a left sleeve, or an attempt to put the hand through the cuff rather than the sleeve at the shoulder.
The sufferer begins to lose his way in familiar surroundings. He becomes unable to tell the time or name the day or date. Speech difficulties increase and he appears to grope for words, to mispronounce words, to reiterate endlessly single syllables or parts of word.
In the third and final stage all intellectual function is grossly impaired. All semblance of communication is lost and patient fails to recognize families, friends and even himself.
And towards the end of life, he loses all semblance of personality and becomes emaciated, incontinent and develops limb contractures without adequate dementia treatment care.