As our loved ones age, it is expected that they will have trouble with activities that may have come easy before. They may lose some of their vision or some of their ability to adapt to new and changing technology. These types of changes are normal and usually aren’t a sign that anything is wrong. In some extreme cases, your loved one may exhibit extreme changes in behaviours or attitudes that are worrying and in fact, may be signs of dementia. Although there is no sure way of stopping dementia or curing it, knowing and assessing these signs early may help you and your family find ways to slow the onset of dementia.
Memory Loss
Some measure of memory loss is not unusual in someone who is getting older. Simply forgetting small and inconsequential things, or forgetting things and remembering them later, is just a part of aging. With memory loss that is indicative of dementia, your loved one may only be able to retain information for a few hours, or even a few minutes. They may also have a difficult time recognizing familiar people or places, including close family members or their home. Often, this is one of the first noticeable signs of dementia.
Trouble with Conversations
Often a loved one suffering from dementia will not be able to converse with family or friends as they once did. For some older people, they may develop a sense of shyness or a quiet dignity about them for one reason or another. For those that are beginning to suffer dementia the cause is much more serious. They may be having difficulty tracking conversations at all and may be unable to remember words or even the topic being discussed. This is much more significant than stumbling over words from time to time as it can impede every interaction that they have.
Some people exhibiting signs of dementia may not realize that they are having difficulty with conversations and may begin to speak in word salad or garden path sentences. While word salad is an easily identifiable speech pattern in which a person speaks in completely random and unrelated words or utterances, garden path sentences are much more difficult to take note of. Garden path sentences have an internal logic where individual words or phrases are connected but they have no context or meaning as a whole. These types of speech patterns can be a quick indication that something is amiss.
Trouble Planning or Carrying Out Simple Tasks
What younger people may see as simple and natural some older people may feel to be foreign and strange. This subjective sense of simplicity shouldn’t raise any red flags. However, if a loved one is having difficulty performing or planning tasks that they have been used to for much of their life, such as following recipes or shopping for groceries, then that could be a symptom of dementia showing through.
Misplacing Items
Many people have infrequent absentmindedness. We may forget where we put our keys or even forget to take them out of our pants from yesterday. As we age, this will continue unimpeded. While people with dementia will misplace things more often, they will also misplace these things in places that they have no business being. Unfortunately, and more seriously, they may even misplace themselves and become extremely lost and because this also may be paired with an inability to backtrack effectively, they may be unable to even remember how they got to where they are.
Difficulty Assessing Time
Many peoples’ sense of time changes drastically as they get older. What may have seemed like forever to you when you were a child may seem like no time at all now that you’re an adult. While this is normal, a person suffering the symptoms of dementia will have difficulty assessing time at all. Not only will this affect what they perceive as the present, but also they may have difficulty comprehending what happened in the past or a concept of the future.
Poor Hygiene
When someone you know has developed some sort of dementia, they frequently become plagued with symptoms relating to bad hygiene. Their home, no matter how immaculate it once was, may quickly degenerate into being more cluttered and less sanitary. This lack of hygiene isn’t just seen in the home, but personal hygiene may also take a backseat as well. This can cause several types of nasty infections and diseases, many of which are known to cause or exacerbate an elder’s descent into dementia.
Hallucinations
In more rare and extreme circumstances, someone that is exhibiting signs of dementia may develop vivid hallucinations, both auditory and visual. In many of these circumstances, they may have a difficult time discerning between what is a hallucination and what is real, partially because of their already deteriorated mental state. This is one of the most pronounced and severe symptoms of dementia in the elderly.
