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Friday, November 29, 2013

Dementia Life Expectancy

By Jack Morgan


Dementia is the medical term used to describe a person's declining mental ability. The decline can be serious enough to affect daily living. Dementia is not a particular illness. It is the overall term to refer to a broad range of symptoms.

Dementia life expectancy may vary from person to person as it also varies on the basis of the cause of dementia. The other factors that determine the life expectancy include time of diagnosis and the reason of having dementia. Dementia is considered as an end of life symptom as any individual who has been diagnosed with the disease is at the final stage of his or her life. Thus for some this final stage may be for 10 years while for others it may be longer. Some may even pass out even earlier than 10 years after being diagnosed with dementia.

The average dementia life expectancy for patients with Alzheimer disease is also affected by several factors. A healthy person who has been diagnosed with dementia prior reaching the age of 70 is expected to live for 10 more years. But a person after reaching 90 years is diagnosed with dementia will only live for 4 more years.

Women lived for about 4.6 years after being diagnosed of dementia. On the other hand, men lived for only 4.1 years. Furthermore, people under 70 years of age lived for 10.7 years on average compared to those who were over 90 years of age and lived only for 3.8 years before they died. And patients who were frail at the time of diagnosis didn't live any longer than 3 years. The study concluded that the average life expectancy of a person who was diagnosed with AD or dementia was 4.5 years.

People with dementia in its first stage usually experience changes in thinking and memory like forgetfulness. This can be easily noticed by family members, but a person suffering from such condition might try to hide it by making up stories to fill memory gaps. At this point, the individual may also express annoyance or anger needing memory skills.

The most common causes of dementia in individual between the age of 45 years and 65 years are human immunodeficiency (HIV), Huntington's disease and multiple sclerosis (MS).

At this stage, a person with dementia begins to withdraw further into old memories and become too pre-occupied with these and may totally live to that reality and time. Wandering is also a possibility at this point. When this occurs, it is essential to determine a valid reason like either the individual is searching for something or trying to ease boredom. Also, the language at this time may mainly consist of one syllables like the word yes and no.

Dementia that is generally brought on by brain deprived of nutrients and oxygen as a result of shrinking arteries and strokes. This type of dementia is known as vascular dementia and the average dementia life expectancy for these patients is about five years or less.

The other factors that increases the chances of having dementia includes high blood pressure, multiple strokes and other risks factors as it can shorten the life expectancy of an individual. Thus the dementia life expectancy in a person depends on the causes of the disease and the area of the brain it has affected.




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