Theme: Aging and Associated Issues
#AtoZChallenge
We tend to associate aging with cognitive decline. Cognitive decline is just a fancy term for dementia or Alzheimer’s Disease. It can also refer to Mild Cognitive Decline which is not considered a form of dementia.
Age-related cognitive decline includes difficulty in finding the right word, slowness of thought, inability to multitask, problems with sustaining attention, and problems with retaining information. In this modern era, if a person exhibits the mildest of these symptoms, their family and doctors automatically jump to the conclusion that they have dementia. If you are worried about a loved one having some form of dementia, these are the symptoms they might be experiencing.
In my grandparent’s era, slowing down a bit mentality was just considered part of the natural process of aging. It was considered to be normal. Nothing to get excited about. Now, everyone wants a diagnosis, so they get slapped with a diagnosis of dementia when mild cognitive decline is, indeed, not dementia at all.
Here are some statistics to think about. Most people who are diagnosed with a form of dementia live in low to middle income countries. There are 55 million people worldwide who have been diagnosed with dementia with five million of those living in the United States. The country where the most dementia is present is Finland. The United Kingdom comes in second. Among developed countries, Japan comes in last. Dementia is on the rise particularly among disadvantaged countries and populations. The harder one has to live, the better the chance of dementia, it seems. People with chronic illnesses also tend to have more dementia.
Mild cognitive decline (MCI) is what most people experience as they age. Sometimes, MCI progresses into full-blown dementia, but often it does not. The symptoms of mild cognitive decline are brief problems with memory, judgment, and language. For example, you may forget where you park, forget your car keys. In the middle of a conversation, you may lose your train of thought or you may not be able to fully follow the conversation. You may get temporarily lost in a place you know well. Your judgment may not be as good as it has been in the past. These symptoms of MCI are nothing to panic about because they happen to almost all people who are aging, but you should report them to your doctor if they get to be particularly bad.
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