Quotes About Dementia

My husband is stricken with dementia, and it's a trick of his condition that events and people from his past are more real to him than what happened five minutes ago.

My grandmother died from Alzheimer's, and it was a big shock. For the families left behind, it is not an easy closure. It's not a gradual fading. The person is losing so much of their humanity as they're dying. Losing your memories, you lose so much of who you are as a person.

It seemed to him [Otto Kugelblitz] obvious that the human life span runs through the varieties of mental disorder as understood in his day—the solipsism of infancy, the sexual hysterias of adolescence and entry-level adulthood, the paranoia of middle age, the dementia of late life ... all working up to death, which at last turns out to be sanity.

El individualismo se consideraba una forma de demencia

Can I remember exactly when I 'lost' my husband? Was it the moment when I had to start tying his shoelaces for him? Or when we stopped being able to laugh with each other? Looking back, that turning point is impossible to pinpoint. But then, that's the nature of dementia.

I hate to sound this way but, 'Why me? Why me with dementia?'

It's as exhausting as dealing with an early-stage dementia sufferer—one with a trillion-pound budget and nuclear-weapons-release authority.

My dad has dementia, so I monitor my own memory in a way that other people may not. As an atheist, I don't believe in an afterlife so I feel I need to fit in as much as I can while I'm here.

We know that chronic loneliness has consequences. It certainly depresses our mood. And in terms of our health, people who struggle with loneliness also have an increased risk for cardiovascular disease, dementia, depression, and anxiety. Loneliness is also associated with a shorter lifespan.

When day-to-day living became too difficult for him, my father moved to a residential home near me and although he'd never had any sort of dementia test, he gradually became unable either to eat or go to the toilet on his own. Eventually the staff found him too difficult to manage.

While no one can change the outcome of dementia or Alzheimer's, with the right support you can change the journey.

Dementia is often regarded as an embarrassing condition that should be hushed up and not spoken about. But I feel passionately that more needs to be done to raise awareness, which is why I became an ambassador for the Alzheimer's Society.

My husband had dementia," she told me softly. "I took care of him for six years with these two hands. For a few months the insurance gave me help. Certain medications they pay after six years. They told me once he couldn't swallow no more there was nothing we could do. . . . He died at home last year.

longitudinal study of people over age 75, conducted over a period of 21 years by the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City, looked at whether activities from playing cards to swimming to doing housework affected cognitive ability. Almost none of the physical activities had any effect on dementia rates except for one: partner dancing, which lowered the risk by 76 percent. No other activity came anywhere near being as effective at protecting people from cognitive decline!3

At the other end of life are elders with severe dementia. The final stage of Alzheimer's and other neurodegenerative diseases is marked by extreme apathy and exhaustion. Individuals cease speaking, gesturing, and even swallowing. Has their conscious mind permanently left its abode, a shrunken brain full of neurofibrillary tangles and amyloid plaques?

When you're working with dementia patients, life is hard for both of you, but at least you don't have to keep coming up with new repartee. And I really don't say that to make light of the situation. I say it to find light in the situation, which I honestly think is a favor to all involved.

Any man who yields habitually to melancholia may expect his brain, sooner or later, to degenerate from its original strength, and relax the toughness and compactness of its fibre. Absolute dementia may not be the result for some years, but there will be occasional and painful indications of the end for a long space before it arrives. The indications, as a rule, will assume the form of visions and dreams and wild imaginings of various sorts. Now do you understand me?

I have sat with countless patients and families to discuss grim prognoses: It's one of the most important jobs physicians have. It's easier when the patient is 94, in the last stages of dementia, and has a severe brain bleed. For young people like me - I am 36 - given a diagnosis of cancer, there aren't many words.

The baby boomers are getting older, and will stay older for longer. And they will run right into the dementia firing range. How will a society cope? Especially a society that can't so readily rely on those stable family relationships that traditionally provided the backbone of care?

Here at St. Anthony's, they have to close the curtains before it gets dark, since if a resident sees themself reflected in a window they'll think somebody's peeping in at them. It's called "sun-downing." When all the old folks get crazy at sunset.

aquí estás otra vez, demencia, vieja conocida, zorra jodida, reconozco tus métodos camaleónicos, te alimentas de la normalidad y la utilizas para tus propios fines, o te le asemejas tanto que la suplantas.

The terror dementia sufferers must feel is unimaginable, but the techniques they use to hide their difficulties - the ducking and diving and keeping the world laughing - are perfectly understandable.

Those with dementia are still people and they still have stories and they still have character and they're all individuals and they're all unique. And they just need to be interacted with on a human level.

The baby boomers are getting older, and will stay older for longer. And they will run right into the dementia firing range. How will a society cope? Especially a society that can't so readily rely on those stable family relationships that traditionally provided the backbone of care?