Understand and enable interaction and communication with individuals who have dementia
1.1
Alzheimer’s disease
Short-term memory loss is associated with Alzheimer’s disease. Individuals affected with this disease may be unable to remember things that have just happened or ask the same questions repeatedly. Individuals suffering with it can also forget people this could be just forgetting their names and eventually just forgetting who they are. This itself can cause communication issues and the individual may not know who they are talking with and on top of that may repeat the same parts of the conversation over and over as they have forgotten what has already been said. Individuals may also struggle in finding the right words or can’t remember the right word for what they want to say so it can be hard to hold a conversation. If they can’t explain what they mean properly an individual with dementia may become frustrated and this can often be dismissed as agitation or aggression.
Vascular Dementia
With Vascular Dementia although the causes are different to Alzheimer’s a lot of the symptoms are similar. For instance they may suffer memory loss, lose things and be disorientated. All these things can cause difficulties when communicating. There can be different symptoms of vascular dementia as different areas of the brain can be affected but most include slower thinking processes. Communication often becomes slow and the individual may find it hard to find the right word or forget what they were trying to say in the first place. This is very frustrating for them. People are often tempted to finish their sentences off for them which can lead to further frustration as its usually finished wrongly and not what they wanted to say.
Dementa with Lewy Bodies (DLB)
Again this does have some common symptoms with Alzheimer’s and Vascular dementia. For example memory loss and disorientation but it also has other symptoms that aren’t always found in other