About Dementia

I am 45 years old.  I'm too young to have dementia... or am I?  My mother, who is a healthy 82 year old woman, lives with me, and that's been a very eye-opening experience for my own aging process.  My mother has started to have noticeable symptoms of dementia.  I say 'noticeable' because at first I was the only one who noticed.  The doctors and my mom were in denial.

The difficulty with dementia is diagnosing the cause.  Is it hereditary?  Dietary?  Hormonal?  Normal part of the aging process? Will it mean you will get alzheimers?

Because of what I see my mother go through, I've been doing my own research.

One of my mother's doctors specializes in geriatrics.  When I mentioned to him that I was noticing signs of forgetfulness in my mother's daily behavior, he brought in an internist who performed a test.

The test consisted of answering simple questions.  Most of them my mom passed with flying colors:  Her name, where we were, what date it was (although she said 1912 instead of 2012), etc.

The difficult part was when she was asked to draw the face of a clock, and to make it show a time of twenty minutes to five.

My mom diligently drew a circle, drew the 12 on the top, a 6 on the bottom, and then I watched as she thought about what she wanted to do next.

She kept hovering over where the 3 would be, but wouldn't write it in.

After a long pause, the internist said "just draw so it's twenty to five".  My mom just stared at the page.  Finally, in frustration, she painted a 5 where the 3 should be, and pointed an arrow to it.  She said in apologetic frustration "I don't know how to do it.  I give up".  I felt really sorry for her.

Since then I've gotten all types of advice from doctors and well-intentioned friends.  Everything from cooking and ingesting lots of coconut oil to putting my mom on bio-identical hormone replacement therapy.  The geriatric doctor recommended a drug called Namenda.  The alternative medicine doctor said Namenda doesn't work and recommended the HRT.

For now my journey continues in search of what to do about dementia.  What to do about the dementia my mother is experiencing, and what I can do to diagnose/prevent my own.