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Early Symptoms of Dementia

Contrary to popular beliefs, dementia is not a single disorder; it is an overall term used to describe a wide range of symptoms that are characterized by a severe decline in an individual’s memory or thinking capacity and affects the person’s ability to perform daily activities. People often attribute dementia to old age, which is true to a certain extent; however, not every individual who goes through the aging process develops dementia. The most common types of dementia are Alzheimer’s disease, Vascular dementia, Parkinson’s disease, FrontoTemporal Lobar Degeneration (FTLD), Dementia with Lewy bodies, Huntington’s disease, Alcohol-related dementia (Korsakoff’s syndrome), and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. Each of these types of dementia has varying underlying causes. Before dementia can surface completely, certain symptoms emerge that is indicative that the disorder is in progress. The early symptoms of dementia are as follows: Alterations in the short-term memory Dementia is characterized by changes or complete loss of memory. One of the earliest symptoms of dementia is that the individual might experience subtle changes to their short-term memory. This means that the person can remember things that happened years ago but might have difficulty in recalling what he had for lunch. Other symptoms of such alterations to the short-term memory might include forgetting where they left things or struggling to remember why they entered a particular room.