Difference Between Dementia and Alzheimer’s

Difference Between Dementia and Alzheimer’s

Dementia is a neurological disorder with detrimental effects on the patient and their caregivers. It is a syndrome characterized by a progressive and persistent decline in cognitive function with resultant significant impairment in memory, behavior, insight, and daily functionality (Emmady et al., 2022). Other aspects that may be affected by the cognitive decline include personality, language, attention, and social and visuospatial skills among others (Emmady et al., 2022)The deterioration should be severe enough to interfere with the affected individual’s independence and performance of activities of daily living.

The causation of dementia is multifactorial and includes Alzheimer’s disease, vascular dementia, dementia of Lewy bodies, Parkinson’s disease dementia, Huntington’s disease, and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease among others (Emmady et al., 2022). Depending on the cause, dementia can occur at any age. For example, Alzheimer’s disease is frequently encountered among the elderly whereas dementia secondary to traumatic brain injury is common among younger individuals (Gale et al., 2018). Dementia has no cure and the available treatment interventions are targeted at symptomatic relief to improve the quality of patient life.

Alzheimer’s disease as opposed to dementia does not encompass a spectrum of disorders but is the most common specific cause of dementia. Alzheimer’s disease is a neurodegenerative disorder of gradual onset and is characterized by a progressive decline in cognition with resultant impaired memory, language, comprehension, attention, reasoning, and judgment (Kumar et al., 2022). The cognitive decline is attributed to the deposition and accumulation of amyloid-beta plaques, neurofibrillary tangles, and dystrophic neurites in the cortical brain and atrophic changes due to the loss of neurons and synapses (Briejyeh et al., 2020). Advanced age is a common predisposing factor with the disease being frequently encountered almost exclusively among geriatric individuals older than 65 years. Rare cases can be found in younger individuals. Alzheimer’s dementia is irreversible whereas some forms of dementia are reversible with early recognition and treatment.

References

Breijyeh, Z., & Karaman, R. (2020). A comprehensive review on Alzheimer’s disease: Causes and treatment. Molecules, 25(24), 5789. https://doi.org/10.3390/molecules25245789

Emmady, P. D., & Tadi, P. (2022). Dementia. In StatPearls. StatPearls Publishing.

Gale, S. A., Acar, D., & Daffner, K. R. (2018). Dementia. The American journal of medicine, 131(10), 1161–1169. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.amjmed.2018.01.022