Symptoms Of Patients With Dementia

Nearly 135 million people worldwide will be impacted by dementia by 2050 (Robinson, Tang, Taylor,. 2015). Dementia is not a disease, it is an overall term that describes a wide range of symptoms associated with the decline in memory and thinking skills. Dementia is a progressive illness that results in the loss of one’s sense of self (Burns, Byrne, Ballard, Holmes, 2002). The two most common forms of dementia are Alzheimer’s disease and Vascular dementia. Dementia is progressive and people with dementia experience complications with short-term memory, keeping track of personal items, paying bills, taking care of themselves and daily tasks (Haigh, Mytton, 2016). Due to the rising number of individuals developing dementia, it is causing major challenges in the healthcare systems and society (Angermeter, Luck, Then, Riedel-Heller, 2016). Utilizing psychotropic medications are often ineffective or harmful to the individual, therefore, many patients decide to utilize sensory therapy as a form of treatment instead (Livingston, Kelly olmes, et al., 2014). Caregivers of individuals with dementia can also experience health consequences related to caregiving at the end of life. Spousal caregivers are 40.5% higher odds of experiencing frailty as a result of caregiving (Carr, Dassel, 2017). Dementia does not only affect the individual, it affects those around them, society, and the healthcare system.

The aim of this assignment is to explore challenging behaviour in the person with dementia. As it is outside the scope of this assignment to explore all the potential reasons for challenging behaviour, the focus of this assignment will be on challenging behaviour in the context of the communication of pain, using a case study to illustrate this. This assignment will describe challenging behaviours, the behaviours associated with pain, and the management strategies employed by nursing staff, using a person-centred approach to care. Finally, ways of improving the care provided will be explored and recommendations made.

Dementia with Lewy bodies (DLB) is a form of dementia which shares characteristics with both Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease. It accounts for around 10% of all cases of dementia in older people and tends to be under-diagnosed. 
Named after the doctor who first identified them in 1912, Lewy bodies are tiny, spherical protein deposits found in nerve cells. Their presence in the brain disrupts the brain’s normal functioning, interrupting the action of important chemical messengers. Lewy bodies are also found in the brains of people with Parkinson’s disease, a progressive neurological disease that affects movement. 
Dementia with Lewy bodies is

This assignment will explore the effect of the long term condition dementia. It will focus on a service user who has recently been admitted onto an assessment ward and their family. It will explore the nurse’s role and how they will support and manage the patient’s illness. The Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC) (2015) state that individual’s rights to confidentiality must be respected at all times, therefore all names mentioned in this assignment have been changed to maintain confidentiality.

The term ‘dementia’ is used to describe a syndrome associated with an ongoing decline of the brain and its abilities. This includes problems with memory loss, thinking speed, mental agility, language, understanding, and judgment. People with dementia can become apathetic or uninterested in their usual activities, and have problems controlling their emotion. They also fine social situation challenging, lose interest in socialising and aspect of their personality may change. The majority of people who are diagnosed with dementia have either Alzheimer’s disease or vascular dementia, or a combination of the two. (Source 1) As the disease progresses, the person experiencing dementia becomes more vulnerable and their needs often complex; which requires appropriate care and management (Kitwood, 1997).this leads me to the next distinctive feature of patients with dementia.

This assignment is going to outline possible effects of dementia on an individual’s health and quality of life. There are many different factors that having dementia will effect. As stated above some will affect the health of the person and others will affect the quality of life that the person will have.

Dementia which was views as a disease is now viewed as a disability. It allows us to view people with dementia as individuals coping with their own impairment and entitled to an adequate quality of life and comfort. To do this it is necessary for us to shift our way of thinking from focusing on dementia as a disease that degenerative without a cure, to focusing on the whole person and seeing dementia as a disability of certain parts of the persons

There are many reasons that Mrs. Yowell may have impaired mental functioning (see Table 1). The first and easiest reason to rule out would be a urinary tract infection (UTI). A urine sample can show if there are white blood cells (indicating infection) present in the urine. The increased levels of bacteria in an elderly person’s body can cause toxicity which leads to the altered mental status (Midthun, 2004). Most noted changes are confusion, agitation and lethargy.

Within the dementia care environment, it is my experience that it is often unclear to nursing staff as to appropriate assessment and management of pain for clients in the palliative stage of their illness.

Horgas et al. (2009) is an in-depth examination of the various factors that can be used to report pain within these specific groups of patients. The journal is from the American Geriatrics Society, and thus is clearly peer-reviewed. It is a thorough examination into how dementia patients report their own pain, as well as how their pain can be observed within actual practice. The data was then coded according to the American Hospital Formulary Service System (Horgas et al 2009). This clearly shows that the research supports evidence-based practices for it uses real observations from patients actually being in the field today in combination with commonly held patterns from prior research.

Dementia is a disorder that leads to a gradual loss of the cognitive capacity of an individual, ultimately affecting one’s daily activities. Dementia does manifests through the accompanying disorders because it does not exist on its own. In other words, dementia is a disorder that comes about through the existence of the related disorders. The main ones are four, but they are not the only disorders that cause dementia. These include Lewy Bodies dementia (LBD), Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and vascular dementia (VD). Others include mixed dementia, Huntington’s disease, Huntington’s disease, Wernicke-Korsakoff Syndrome, Parkinson’s disease, Creutzfeldt-Jacob disease, Normal Pressure Hydrocephalus and Frontotemporal dementia. According to Ram (2006), these disorders have a broad spectrum of impacts on the patients besides having devastating effects on the overall economy of the world’s nations especially when the number is significantly high. The paper intends to dig out the milestones the dementia disorder has undergone.

Dementia is an extremely common disease among the elderly, with 4 million Americans currently suffering from the Alzheimer’s type alone. Figures show that 3% of people between the ages of 65-74 suffer from the disease, rapidly increasing to 19% for the 75-84 age bracket, and as high as 47% for the over 85s. Therefore, it is easy to see why Dementia is such a large part of many people’s lives, whether they are suffering from the condition themselves, or have an elderly relative who requires full time care just to undertake simple day to day tasks. The disease can be extremely traumatic for the patient and their families, as the person, who may have been extremely lively and bright throughout their

Aim/ purpose of study: Conglomeration of current data on pain and pain management for patients with dementia.

The authors of the article each come with their own perepectives on pain management in the cognitively impaired older adult.

Chronic pain in older adults is defined as ‘‘an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with actual or potential tissue damage, or described in terms of such damage, for persons who are either aged (65 to 79 years old) or very aged (80 and over) and who have had pain for greater than 3 months’’ (Lynch, 2000, p.270). The consequences of chronic pain may also be related to impaired activities of daily living (ADLs), physical disability, accidents, gait abnormalities, polypharmacy, and cognitive decline in older adults (Mantyselka et al., 2001; Kaye et al., 2010; Shega et al., 2010). Therefore, chronic pain has negative affects on older adults, their families, and social relationships.