How it is to foget
Symptoms for dementia is confusion and memory loss.
As life expectancy rises, dementia is increasingly becoming a public health and social-cultural issue in Ghana. Lack of public awareness og behavior associated with the condition means that women displaying symptoms are sometimes perceived as witches. Sometimes they are even sent away to live in so-called "witch camps"
What is dementia?
Dementia is a condition where mental skills are impaired due to illness. The impact on the brain is so pronounced that it affects one's ability to manage oneself in everyday life.
Which symptoms should you pay particular attention to?
It can happen to all people that memory fails or that a situation can be difficult to grasp. The problems must be so pronounced that they affect one's ability to cope in everyday life. However, the symptoms usually develop slowly and insidiously.
Why do you get dementia?
The risk of dementia increases with age, but dementia is always caused by disease. Dementia is therefore not a natural consequence of getting older. There are many different diseases that can lead to dementia:
The most frequent cause of dementia is Alzheimer's disease, which at least half of all people with dementia have. The exact cause of Alzheimer's disease is not known, but it is linked to the harmful accumulation of protein in the brain
The second most frequent cause of dementia is vascular dementia (also called circulatory dementia), which can be the result of a blood clot or bleeding in the brain
Other, less frequent forms of dementia are Lewy Body dementia, dementia in Parkinson's disease and frontotemporal dementia (frontal lobe dementia).
Finally, symptoms of dementia can be seen in a number of conditions such as vitamin deficiency, metabolic disease or alcohol abuse.
It is important to know that dementia is an illness, where the person needs help and not sent away.
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