Dementia and Aging: When is it Time to Evaluate for Dementia
United Psychological Services specializes in the accurate diagnosis and treatment of dementia.
Signs of Developing Dementia:
- Repeating your sentences
- Memory seems worse
- Forgetting day to day items
- Forgetting what someone just said
- Lost in familiar places, losing your sense of direction
- Lost going to the grocery store around the corner
- Difficulty completing daily tasks around the house
- Unable to make decisions, changing your mind all the time
- Incorrect assumptions occurring more often
- Misinterpreted conversations
- Accusing others of taking things
- Rapid mood changes
- Not remembering conversations you had the day before
- Loss of words and cannot communicate thoughts
- Loss of thought while searching for the word
- Restricted social activities
- Feeling confused often
- Less organized in your day, still in your pajamas at 6:00 in the evening
- Forgetting routine activities
- Glasses found in the refrigerator, checkbook in the kitchen cupboard
- New situations are frightening and avoided.
- Decreased inhibition, alcoholic personalities return
- Saying the wrong thing at the wrong time, poor social skills, unawareness of feelings of others
- Cannot shift to different activity if things do not work out
- Cannot shift to different thought, rigid thinking
Emotional changes often signal the onset of dementia as a secondary or primary symptom:
- Dementia involving strictly the frontal lobe (Pick’s Disease and Creutzfelt-Jacob)
- Dementia involving the parietal and frontal lobe (Lewy body dementia)
- Dementia specifically involving the temporal and frontal lobe (cardiovascular and traumatic head injury)
Significant emotional changes that would suggest the need for evaluation:
- Reverting back to old personality
- Emotions out of context, not making sense for the situation
- Emotions out of control and not characteristic of the person
- Increased impulsivity or compulsivity
- Screaming, rages that are not provoked
- No longer caring about others, rules, or the “appropriateness of the situation” or what people may think
- Difficulty appreciating the feelings of others or to feel how they might be feeling.
- Lack of understanding as to why people might be upset with you
- Depression that is deep and results in total isolation
- Easily angered and frustrated
- Tendency to argue over anything, need to be right much of the time.
- Easily stressed and emotionally reactive, traits not seen before
- Acting in a more immature manner, sexual acting out, poor table manners
- Not able to budget finances, spending sprees
Significant cognitive or thinking changes that would suggest the need for evaluation:
- Not able to recall newly learned information
- Cannot set goals to accomplish during the day
- Easily distracted by everything around you
- Difficulty determining what you want to do first and sticking with that plan
- Thinking that makes no sense, only you don’t know it
- Statements out of context to the discussion
- Obsessed, and overly preoccupied with objects, thoughts, or events
- Your actions may seem to occur without rhyme or reason.
- Cannot think flexibly
- Becoming stuck and thinking the same thought over and over
- Thinking and re-thinking about specific topics
- Erase and re-erasing, writing the same to-do lists
- Your brain is so busy you cannot complete your thoughts, finish your sentence, or hear what someone else is saying to you
