The Difference Between Dementia and Alzheimer's Disease

This article is poorly written. The reader is trying to learn information that distinguishes Alzheimers dementia from other
dementias. The author simply repeats that it is not easy to distinguish the dementias.

you sir are an idiot

you read maybe the first paragraph

the author CLEARLY states that Alzheimers is the most common CAUSE of dementia but that there are other causes as well, so, if you can read English, the answer to the question that forms the title of the article is simply "Alzheimers is one cause of dementia, but not the only one"

get a clue dude!

My husband is 69 and recently was placed on Aricept for MCI.  He was unable to tolerate Aricept due to severe diarhea.  He is now tolerating Exelon well.

Since my husband sufferred a five day coma ten years ago following CABYS x'6, and a 72 unit bleed, 72 is not a typo...he was never quite the same clinically, especially physically, with some short term memory issues.  He was forced into medical retirement.  However, he is very well educated;his intellect is extremely high, and he has had a very productive successful career. (He is very able to hide his current condition for the most part publicly...at home is a different story.)

This past year, I experienced him to be more moody; agitated; increased recent memory loss; and impossible to reason or talk through anything to do with emotions, and finances. He can blow up and say cruel things and five minutes later act as though nothing happened.

I was able to encourage him to see an Internist who ordered a CAT  Scan.  A mass was discovered on the center ventricular of his brain.  He was seen by the Head of Oncology and Neurosurgery at JHH in Baltmore, MD  Apparently the mass is benign and/or an annomaly which we recently discovered was present in 1997 when he had his storke. Although he was not informed he had a mass...neither was the family in 1997.  Johns Hopkins referred him to a Neurologist.  He was fortunate to be able to see the same Neurologist who evaluated him in 1998.  The Neurologist dx. MCI and placed him on Aricept....The dx. of Alzheimers was not verbalized although we all know that Aricept is used to treat Alzheimers as described in the sample packets presented to my husband.

My husband is doubtful of the Alzheimer's  dx. because of his past medical history. He has decided to seek another evaluation by a Gerontolgist who specializes in Dementia.

1.  I am struggling as his caretaker to sort how much of this is brain damage stroke related.  Depression? Is the present condition, which has increased in the past year, due to age and earlier clinical insults that is leading to Dementia/Alzheimer's Disease?  Is his condition a combination of all these clinical happenings?  Is there something else we should be doing, or not doing?

I am trying very hard to support him, but his anxiety and agitation is a real challenge.

He sees a Psychologist who specializes in ADHD and is pretty clueless about Dementia.   I have seen no progress as a result of this therapy.

Thank you very much.

 

This is one of the most poorly written articles that I have read.  it offers the reader absolutely nothing.  How it got published is beyond me.

There was a study in minnesota..of nuns..nuns that got alz and nuns that didn't.  In the end...the same plaques were in the brains of the nuns that didn't get alzheimers as the ones that did. So those plaques are not necessarily the end-all marker for alzheimers. What the study did come up with is that the early writings of the nuns who got alzheimers was simple sentences with not much digression from questions asked. Whereas the nuns that didn't get alzheimers were using more adjectives in their writing. For example...I was born in north dakota. my parents came from norway. I was brought up on a farm. In contrast...the nuns who didn't get alz...wrote more like this: I was born in a small farm in the northeastern part of north dakota. It was a dairy farm and we had cow and chickens . All my siblings would have chores. My chore was to blah blah blah. My parents came from norway. they had met at ellis island on the dock as they were getting off the boat. my mother fell off the dock into water and my dad saved her. we heard that story every christmas until we left home. 

Actually...that had nothing to do with the writing above..but my doctor told me once when i brought my mother in that there was a difference between alz and a stroke...and that stroke victims could be really ****** off at this and that...but the alz. patients were not as angry cause it was affecting a different part of the brain. i guess that also has nothing to do with dementia/alz differences.  

 

 

Sorry..this must be beginning alz for me...there were absolutely no adjectives used in my sample of the nuns who didn't get alz...but you get the idea...there writings were more interested in details..etc. But then iris murdoch..the writer...writing all her life with all kinds of details..etc...she got alz.

 

This is why i think people get alz. they've been independent their whole lives and god or their own souls or whatever want them to learn to let go and be taken care of by others. but ronald regean...he was totally dependent on his wife...so forget that theory. how about..they just want to check out...tired of the whole thing...but they happened to have healthy hearts and aren't about to die...so they just let go of their minds...its a choice.

 

I could come up with a different theory every hour from now until i forget why i'm writing these theories. 

Sorry..this must be beginning alz for me...there were absolutely no adjectives used in my sample of the nuns who didn't get alz...but you get the idea...there writings were more interested in details..etc. But then iris murdoch..the writer...writing all her life with all kinds of details..etc...she got alz.

 

This is why i think people get alz. they've been independent their whole lives and god or their own souls or whatever want them to learn to let go and be taken care of by others. but ronald regean...he was totally dependent on his wife...so forget that theory. how about..they just want to check out...tired of the whole thing...but they happened to have healthy hearts and aren't about to die...so they just let go of their minds...its a choice.

 

I could come up with a different theory every hour from now until i forget why i'm writing these theories. 

I've been taking care of my mother who is 86 now since 1995. She has deteriorated in physical ways..incontinent..blind..can't walk well..but she is very peaceful and participates in laughter around her. I attribute her peacefulness to homepathy. Not herbalism...homeopathy...look for a classical homepath in the area where you live. I can help if you can't figure it out.

 

 

when my father got sick at age 81, my mother kept saying it is only dementia. after about a year, there were more symptoms. his first sign of dementia was after a bad anesthesia experience during surgery, a few years before. how much did that affect the eventual outcome? we don't know. our family friend, charley had a heart event on vacation in maine. neither of the two defibrillators in the hospital worked and they only kept him alive by cpr for ten minutes or so, until they found some machine that worked. after that, charley went right to alzheimer's.

 

i think people want to call the symptoms 'dementia' because they worry it might be hereditary. for a patient, it sucks, no matter what you call it. my father was always a nice person, but he knew something was wrong and eventually, he had occasional nasty behavior.

 

i hope the doctors spend our donations on something really effective, not dumbass articles like this.

Why doesn't anyone talk about dementia caused from syphillis??  It's always about the alzheimer's disease.  Neurosyphillis is more common now in older people than before.  I would like some information on this condition for once.  My grand mother is 80 years old and she is going down hill very quickly.  Is there anyone else who has a family member with this disease???

I do not understand why others are bashing your site. I found your information simple and to the point - I appreciate that! I found exactly what I needed without having to read a bunch more of medical jargon I wasn't looking for. I tho't you were quite "to the point" and want to thank you for taking the time to write the article.

 

I got absolutely nothing from this article. I still don't know the difference between the two!

Genescient has some populations of long lived drosophila because for nearly three decades the males have not been permited to mate until half had died. When they went to see what genes had been up or down regulated compared to wild type fruit flys, they first asked their geneticists to guess how many they would find, they answered a dozen or maybe fifty, but it was almost a thousand of which we share about 700.

 

Since the flies also suffer from Alzheimer's and these long lived ones postpone the onset, Genescient plans to design a combination of micronutrients to have similar effects on the metabolic pathways which these 700 genes participate in. Perhaps in a year or two we will have a dietary supplement cocktail to put off both Alzheimer's and dementia in humans. There is an interesting problem of how to profit when there is no way to patent a cocktail of GRAS (generally regarded as safe) supplements.

I found your article very informative. As a midlife caregiver to my mother who has had Alzheimer's Disease for over 10 years, I've found out that every person is affected differently even though their diagnosis is the same. My mother cannot speak coherent sentences anymore, but is very engaged with life still, enjoying the communal atmosphere at her care home, & our visits of course, & communicating with her facial expressions & her eyes. The gift of her dementia has been the loss of much of her anxiety, and she resides in a place of peace & contentment much of the time.

 

I write about my personal journey & provide information to help other midlife caregiver women learn to look after themselves in my newly released e-book "The Caregiver in MidLife: Where their needs end & yours begin".

 

Ellen Besso, Writer, Life Coach & MidLife Caregiver

www.ellenbesso.com

What a merry-go-round!  This article is a sham.  Dr., you write as if you know nothing about Alzheimer's much less comparing / contrasting it to something else.  Yes, the internet has parrots and ones that are truly intelligent.  We have to distinguish between the two.