Listening to the news this week of the breakthroughs to detect or possibly help Alzheimer’s patients with a scan or MRI; then a possible new method of treatment by stimulating the brain cells of individuals using a defibrillator like device was exhilarating and frustrating at the same time. One would think, on face value, we had made such wonderful progress in our research of dementia. Because the word used in proclaiming the great medical advances was dementia. The newscaster even went on to say Alzheimer’s and other dementias.
The problem is Alzheimer’s and other dementias are not the same. There are many different causes for dementia, some of which can be cured immediately and others so different that the advertised help this week will not come close to helping with them. Dementia cause by dehydration or medication interaction can be cured very quickly by alleviating the current situation. Dehydration is one of the most common causes of dementia in the spring and summer; the cure is of course focusing on hydration; while medication interaction is also quickly cured by adjusting the dose or changing the medication.
The treatments of Lewy Body Dementia and Korsacoff’s Dementia are so entirely different from Alzheimer’s that families, who have members suffering from them, will become very agitated when they are mentioned in the same paragraph with Alzheimer’s. We need to speak of dementia by disease name rather than by the most obvious sign of the disease. Parkinson’s disease is Parkinson’s disease and not just dementia. There is so much more to the diseases please pressure the medical field and pharmacological professions to use the correct name. www.alz.com
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