Dr. Mauricio Quesada, a physician specializing in geriatrics, details the warning signs and symptoms to detect Alzheimer's disease.
Sometimes people ask themselves: Is what my elderly relative has normal? We have grown up with the idea that every person will have memory problems as they grow older, and we know that this is not true.
People can tell when someone, even if they are older, is not necessarily ill. For example, when there are normal aging changes that do not generate any type of disease as such, gray hair, wrinkles, changes in the color of the teeth, among others.
The changes we see are typical of aging and are not the consequence of any disease; the big problem with memory is that we do not see it. We have to ask different questions and evaluations to determine if, beyond the physical, there are memory problems.
We know that the aging process is normal and that all human beings are going to have it -absolutely all of us- and, above all, it can generate some kind of slowing down of certain patterns, but none of them affect the way we function.
However, something is causing the dementia.
As we get older, we can notice things that change and things that don't change to try to figure out if that's normal or not, if we inherited the dementia problem from a family member. A memory and thinking problem, outside of normal aging, will always translate into a health problem.
What things do not change as we age:
But, with the passage of time and with the advance of aging, they can diminish:
According to Dr. Quesada, these types of changes should be mild, but if a person's ability to speak, attention, language, which had always been normal, changes, it is a warning call for which we should consult because it is a problem that is outside normal aging.
Mild cognitive impairment is not necessarily going to develop into dementia, but it is important to keep that in mind because it is an earlier stage. If we look at that timeline, dementia is not a diagnosis as such, it is a stage in time of a problem that started as normal cognitive aging, which is not a disease. Mild cognitive impairment and dementia are more severe diseases, that is an evolution of the memory problem over time and is not a specific cause.
People blame memory; however, a person who goes to the supermarket and forgets to pay or has trouble giving change does not have a memory loss as such, but a calculation problem, among many other examples.
Dementia is not a cause, but rather a syndrome, an evolution over time of the memory problem, and, for example, can cause it:
The most effective treatment is preventive treatment, not pharmacological, to avoid side effects, activating and stimulating the brain, for example:
As the saying goes: What is good for the heart is good for the brain!