Delirium Is The Disruption Of One 's State Of Mind Essay

Patient living in the nursing homes with diagnosis of dementia experience Disruptive behavior. According to Burton et al. (2015) more than 44 million people have dementia. Dementia affects memory, thinking and social abilities. These symptoms severely interfere with daily functioning of the patient. Approximately 90% of dementia patients demonstrate psychological and behavioral symptoms such as anxiety, agitation, depression, hallucination, delusion, and aggression (Chen et al., 2014). Behavioral and psychological symptoms of dementia (BPSD) are a varied group of non-cognitive symptoms affecting demented patients. These symptoms are delusion, hallucination, agitation, anxiety, euphoria, disinhibition, night-time behavioral disturbances

Consciousness is a state of awareness. This includes a person’s feelings, sensations, ideas, and perceptions. There are many different states of consciousness.

b) Delirium – this illness comes on quickly and advances rapidly. It is caused by infections, dehydration, and thyroid dysfunction and can be a side effect from certain drugs. Once the individual is receiving treatment they will be on their way to returning to their normal state. The symptoms are similar to dementia as it can cause memory loss, disorientation, language disturbances and hallucinations.

What if you lived in a society where love is considered a disease? Lena and Alex live in a world where the government sees love as illegal. People can get arrested for being in love, and even be executed for it. The book that this society is in is called Delirium, by Lauren Oliver. Lena and Alex fall in love in this dystopian society, and try to defy the government. They meet up secretly, and even try to escape together. A message that I’ve gotten from this is that love can’t be restrained no matter what.

Delirium is defined as a disturbed state of mind which is accompanied by confusion, restlessness, illusions, incoherence & sometimes hallucinations.

Excited delirium syndrome is a rare but dangerous disease generally recognized by agitation, aggression, disorientation, and sometimes sudden death. Often associated with drug usage. There has been some documentation as early as the 1800s, but it manly started to come back around in the 1980s. These patients will often need to be restrained, usually by law enforcement, and pose a great danger to the crew’s safety until restrained and sedated. Excited deliriums cause is somewhat unknown. There is much conflict from researcher’s on the why and how.

Dementia is a group of symptoms affecting memory, thinking and social abilities enough to interfere with daily functioning. Dementia can also make changes in memory. Delirium is a serious disturbance in mental abilities that results in confused thinking and reduced awareness of your environment. Delirium usually starts rapidly with abrupt confusion, emerging over days or weeks and represents a sudden change from the person’s previous course of Dementia.

The appropriate assessment of patients prior to surgery to identify coexisting medical problems and to plan peri-operative care is of increasing importance. The goals of peri-operative assessment are to identify important medical issues in order to optimise their treatment, inform the patient of the risks associated with surgery, and ensure care is provided in an appropriate environment secondly to identify important social issues which may have a bearing on the planned procedure and the recovery period and to familiarise the patient with the planned procedure and the hospital processes.(American Society of Anaesthesiologists)

Delirium is a serious condition that can affect patients in and outside the hospital. With its presence being unknown to many nurses and providers, delirium has significant long term complications that can last well beyond discharge. Noise, medication, and infection are significant in the development and progression of delirium and these are more than abundant within intensive care patients. The importance of nurse’s knowledge cannot be stressed enough regarding the assessment, symptoms, and interventions of delirium, in an effort to decrease its occurrence

As people get old a few of them will experience changes in cognition with age related capacity rather than intellectual capacity. There are some people who get both disparities of mentally and physically impaired that will led into depression due to aging process of their body. Even though, the forgetfulness is a common among older adults, we as healthcare providers must evaluate altered mental status of the patients. “The evaluation and management of altered mental status are broad and require careful history and physical examination to eliminate life-threatening situations”(Patti & Dulebohn, 2017). Therefore, it is very important to recognize the importance of difference between normal age-related symptoms and developing new health problems that can arise in this specific population. As elders get older their memory lapses it frustrating to them leading them to be more worried about changes in their memory. Nurses have a unique capability to promote a cognitive health and determine the possibilities of potential cases of the impairment in elders. The movie “On Golden Pond” Mr. Norman was a perfect example and showed that his symptoms were interfering with his everyday live when he almost burns down the house with fire, calling Bill by his daughter’s name Chelsea and getting lost in on the lake. Even though, Mr. Norman had heart and dementia problems his wife never discouraged him to do what he liked such as

Over one-third of the surgeries in the United States are performed on patients aged 65 and older, and delirium is one of the most common postoperative complications in this population. Despite the high incidence of delirium, the syndrome often goes undiagnosed. Postoperative delirium is associated with adverse functional and cognitive outcomes, increased hospital length of stay, cost of care, and mortality rate. Knowledge of the risk factors that predict postoperative delirium will aid early identification of the patients at highest risk in order to facilitate preoperative optimization by managing comorbidities or employing targeted prevention strategies.

The investigation of how anesthesia effects cognitive functioning has had a long history. Overtime, it has been suggested that there is an association between anesthesia, surgery, delirium, dementia and postoperative cognitive dysfunction (Inan & Ozkose Satirlar, 2015). The theory of anesthesia’s impact on cognitive functioning was derived in 1887, by Savage, who began to observe the “insanity” that follows the use of anesthesia. He suggested that “Any cause which will give rise to delirium may set up a more chronic form of mental disorder quite apart from any febrile disturbance” (Savage, 1887, p. 1199). Delirium can be defined as an altered level of consciousness that may cause a sudden decline in attention and focus perception (Isik, 2015). Postoperative delirium was reevaluated in 1955 when Bedford used a series of case studies collected over a 50 year span to describe a connection between anesthesia and dementia. The results suggest that 10% of the patients had postoperative cognitive dysfunction (Bedford, 1955). Since these initial studies, research has persisted using a variety of methods, in an attempt to determine: both long- and short-term effects of anesthesia on cognitive functioning and memory; whether the anesthesia administration technique will change the outcome of postoperative cognitive dysfunction; and other risk factors that may be associated to AD.

Enhanced assessment and nursing implementations to better prevent and detect ICU delirium will bring improved outcomes for this particular patient population. There are many ways to assess for ICU delirium. Two of the most reliable and easiest methods are basic observations from the bedside nurse and The Confusion Assessment Method (CAM). The CAM includes nine different criteria for delirium (1) acute onset and fluctuation, (2) inattention, (3) disorganized thinking, (4) altered level of consciousness, (5) disorientation, (6) memory impairment, (7) perceptual disturbances, (8) psychomotor agitation or retardation, and (9) altered sleep-wake cycle. A delirium diagnosis is given when criteria one and two and either three or four are present. The second assessment tool for delirium detection is made from nursing observations. The nurse observes the patient throughout their

According to Mc Donnell & Timmons (2012), “Acute delirium is a preventable, treatment, disorder of consciousness and cognition that commonly presents across many healthcare settings, including older care facilitates, medical and surgical ward, intensive care units and children’s ward”(p.2488). In their article, A quantitative exploration of the subjective burden experienced by nurses when caring for patients with delirium, Mc Donnell and Timmins outline a descriptive study. Even though prevention and treatments are well recognized, dealing with delirium can be very difficult. The purpose of this study is to examine the subjective burden nurses experience when caring for patients with delirium and to identify the individual aspects of delirium that nurses find most difficult to deal with. In the introduction of the article, the authors argue that beyond qualitative studies there is insufficient practical research on the impact and burden of delirium on nurses in practice (Mc Donnell & Timmins, 2012). This argument outlines the premise behind the research. It is not a research question, but a statement of belief upon which they draw in framing the purpose and focus of their research. The authors articulate their recognition of the fact that many researchers have only focused on the diagnosis, treatment, and prevention for delirium. In addition, they also recognized that nurses often lack knowledge and understanding

Delirium, Depression, and Dementia are some of the most common psychological diagnoses in the elderly today. The three D’s are difficult to differentiate between in older adults because they overlap with each other and can all exist in the same patient at once. Delirium, Dementia, and Depression all affect the elderly’s quality of life and often increase the risks for one another (Downing, Caprio & Lyness, 2013). For the purpose of this paper I will be focusing primarily on the diagnosis of Dementia, the prevention, and nursing measures associated with it, but first I would like to differentiate between Delirium and Depression because Dementia is often associated with the two in the older adult population.