What is dementia?
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It’s like living inside a dream, you sometimes forget how you ended up in that room or in that situation and in some cases you forget people for a moment but you try to play around and continue in the scenario you are
This is a great question. I’m assuming you mean mechanically what is it?
Basically, the disease makes the brain stops braining properly. It’s usually genetic but some really gnarly chemicals can mutate your genes and cause it.
It happens in stages, but it’s essentially just a system by system shutdown of the brain. pull some harddrives here, delete a sys32 file there, until the individual is simply floating through a mental reality untethered by structure, unable to build new connections, often times unable to keep together recent connections.
The whole thing is terrifying. It’s like you as a person just… unravel. The only thing left of you is the parts that were so deeply engraved they don’t float away. Memories from when you were much younger take over your perception of reality and you just can’t pull it together enough most of the time to even realize.
Dementia is the primary end stage symptom of degenerative diseases of the brain. In short it’s the accumulation of neuronal injuries that build up over time. Every neurodegenerative dementia disorder works differently.
Alzheimer’s disease is the most common cause of dementia. In this disease it’s a cell membrane protein called amyloid that accumulates in the brain instead of being cleared properly with the brain’s metabolic garbage in our cerebrospinal fluid. In its accumulated form it is toxic to structural proteins like this one called tau. This causes the structure of affected brain cells to break down, causing a neuronal injury. The buildup of these micro-injuries eventually results in atrophy of the brain itself. The combination of injuries at the small scale and loss of brain volume at a larger scale manifests as cognitive symptoms collectively called dementia.
More practically, dementia is when a person’s cognitive impairment is severe enough that they lack the ability to function independently and require significant personal care and assistance. There is a wide spectrum in people with dementia and also a lot of daily variation.
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There’s build up on the synapses. So basically nothing is firing like before. It’s kind of similar to high blood pressure with clogged arteries. There’s a lot more after that. People start forgetting things. It gets worse and basically the synapses get dirtier. I think a decent comparison is spark plugs. The gap gets messed up and dirty and things just go down hill. It generally starts in the brain but spreads.
I watched my father and mother both go through this and it’s terrifying. They go through a small drop in cognitive ability, then rebound and you think, “oh, they’re fine, just a slip.” Then they lose a bit more and don’t recover as much this time. And suddenly it accelerates and in the space of a few weeks, they’re no longer there.
And as both my parents passed as a result of this, I know I’m almost guaranteed to go the same way…
The brain is an organ, and like any organ, it can be atrophy for many reasons, and this atrophy is what we call dementia. This damage can come from general aging, but also stress, insomnia, nutritional deficit, and more can make this damage increase over time.
It can also be caused by physical damage like CTE or neurological disorders like Alzhiemers’s that can speed up the atrophy of the brain.
Brain atrophy will happen to anyone who lives long enough, and you can take steps now to reduce your risk of dementia in old age. It develops at different speeds for everyone based on a wide range of factors but can never be reversed.
Dementia is the generic term for a collection of symptoms associated with a decline in a person’s cognitive abilities. This includes things like memory loss, loss of impulse control, loss of ability to think and reason, loss of emotional regulation, loss of the ability to speak, and even a decline and loss of the ability to control or move your body. Dementia is typically and most commonly associated with old age, but it can also result from certain genetic disorders, non-genetic diseases, or physical brain injuries.
Dementia is typically progressive, meaning the symptoms often start out mild and increase in severity as time passes. Some types of dementia can be slowed down but there is no cure and no typically no way to reverse any of the cognitive decline.
The most common type of dementia that you’ve probably heard of is Alzheimer’s disease, which makes up more than half of all types of dementia.
It’s like the bookkeeper and secretary checked out or quit with no warning. And over time things become increasingly disorganized and chaotic. The information is all there, but nobody is filing it away or organizing it such that you can find what you need when you need it.
You know that feeling when you can’t quite remember the name of that one movie or actor? And then you have that fleeting moment where you remember it and forget it again immediately? That information is there, but the connection or pathway to retrieve the information isn’t.
It starts at the latest novel information and works it’s way down. At first you just can’t remember your daughters name. Then you can’t remember who she is. You know that you know who she is, but you can’t quite put your finger on it (just like trying to remember the name of that movie).
Not a scientific explanation I know, but take those moments you can’t remember that one thing and try to imagine that’s how your entire existence is (at least that’s where it leads at the end).
I work in a home for people with dementia, and a simplified way of understanding it was given in the idea of a tall bookcase with memories stored from the bottom shelves up; throughout your life.
If that bookcase is then shaken, books from the top will be the first to go, and most of the lower shelves will remain intact.
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