Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
Geriatric psychiatry, also known as geropsychiatry, psychogeriatrics or psychiatry of old age, is a branch of medicine and a subspecialty of psychiatry dealing with the study, prevention, and treatment of neurodegenerative, cognitive impairment, and mental disorders in people of old age.
In contrast to major depression, dementia is a progressive neurodegenerative syndrome involving a pervasive impairment of higher cortical functions resulting from widespread brain pathology. [7] A significant overlap in cognitive and neuropsychological dysfunction in dementia and pseudodementia patients increases the difficulty in diagnosis.
The main principle distinguishing neurocognitive disorders from mood disorders and other psychiatric conditions that involve a cognitive component (i.e. increased lapses in memory noted by patients with depression) is that cognitive decline is the "defining characteristic" of the disorder.
Educating the caregiver about depression in dementia is of primary importance in addressing the problem. Caregivers need to understand the need for structure and comfort in the patient's daily activities, as well as the importance of including activities that the patient finds enjoyable and of trying to convey a sense of pleasure themselves.
Delirium can be confused with multiple psychiatric disorders or chronic organic brain syndromes because of many overlapping signs and symptoms in common with dementia, depression, psychosis, etc. [4] [5] Delirium may occur in persons with existing mental illness, baseline intellectual disability, or dementia, entirely unrelated to any of these ...
Dementia and delirium are the cause of the confusion, orientation, cognition or alertness impairment. [11] Therefore, these symptoms require more attention because hallucinations, delusions, amnesia, and personality changes are the result. These effects of the dementia and delirium are not joined with the changes of sensory or perception abilities.
Sundowning, or sundown syndrome, [1] is a neurological phenomenon wherein people with delirium or some form of dementia experience increased confusion and restlessness beginning in the late afternoon and early evening. It is most commonly associated with Alzheimer's disease but is also found in those
The International Classification of Diseases (ICD) is an international standard diagnostic classification for a wide variety of health conditions. The ICD-10 states that mental disorder is "not an exact term", although is generally used "...to imply the existence of a clinically recognisable set of symptoms or behaviours associated in most cases with distress and with interference with ...