A person experiencing dementia may easily become overwhelmed and flustered. They may then have even greater difficulty than usual with remembering, with managing tasks and with functioning independently. They may become very anxious, angry, ashamed or distressed in other ways. The heightened emotion can then further interfere with their ability to ‘think straight’, to function well, and a ‘vicious cycle or circle’ may set in. This has been called a ‘catastrophic reaction’ and is discussed in Chapter 4 of my…..
Another cause of severe memory loss, particularly affecting people over 80 years of age, has been found. So the known causes of the disorders called dementia are now believed to be: Alzheimer’s disease, Vascular dementia, Dementia with Lewy bodies, ‘LATE’ (the newly understood cause) and, importantly various mixtures of these brain disorders. You can read about it in a CNN post: https://edition.cnn.com/2019/04/30/health/dementia-late-alzheimers-study/index.html or in detail in an article in the journal Brain.