I think, therefore I am?

The following article was written by Dr Kartar Badsha who lives in Southport and has Dementia.

Do the “experts” in dementia understand the patients? The simple answer is no. This is because most “experts” feel that having read a few books written not by sufferers but other so called “experts” they are able to comprehend and formulate treatment management. In order to understand dementia one has to go the basics of what it involves and recognise that progressive degeneration of the brain is only the final phase.

Dementia is most often thought of as a memory disorder, an illness of the aging mind. In its initial stages, that's true — memory loss is an early hallmark of dementia. But anyone who suffers know it is more than just that and it is more like a terminal disease, like cancer often unseen, that physically kills patients. It is not simply a mental ailment that accompanies older age.

Dementia is not a single illness but a collection or consequence of many, including Parkinson's disease, vascular dementia and Alzheimer's disease (which accounts for some 70% of all dementia cases). In the advanced stages of dementia, it is often impossible to tell which disease the patient had at the outset, as the end result is the same, according to Mitchell's study (Dr. Susan Mitchell of the Harvard-affiliated Hebrew SeniorLife Institute for Aging Research): a syndrome of symptoms and complications — eating problems (86%), pneumonia (41%), difficulty breathing (46%), pain (39%) and fever (53%) — caused by brain failure.

"Dementia ends up involving much more than just the brain," says Dr. Claudia Kawas, professor of neurology at the University of California, Irvine. "We forget the brain does everything for us — controls the heart, the lungs, the gastrointestinal tract, the metabolism." She further concluded that "Our main findings confirmed dementia has high mortality. People in the study didn't have other devastating things happen to them before they died”.

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