Question
Are dementia and Alzheimer's disease the same thing?
Answer
Dementia and Alzheimer's disease are not the same thing. Dementia is the set of symptoms that can include things like language disturbances, word finding issues, inability to understand directions, repetitive question asking, wandering, and difficulties with ADLs. We see people lose the ability to sequence correctly to do things like dressing, personal grooming, and bathing. We may see personality disorders such as disengagement, lack of initiative to do an activity, aggression or depression. Dementia encompasses all of those symptoms.
What is interesting is that the cause of these symptoms can be something like Alzheimer’s disease, with plaques and tangles forming in the brain, the hallmark of Alzheimer's disease. They lead to the symptoms that would be incorporated in the dementia definition. If a person starts to have a fever, you may wonder what the cause might be, maybe the flu, maybe a cold, or a virus. Again the fever is a symptom of something bigger going on within someone’s system, just as these symptoms that are related to dementia are symptoms of perhaps a bigger issue such as Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's, or stroke. It is important to be able to differentiate those things, particularly when we are educating other staff or family members who are trying to understand what is going on with their loved one.
Persons with dementia do have a number of weaknesses in learning and memory, but a number strengths exist as well. The research has shown that the learning of information and its retention depends heavily on how it is presented. That is the focus of what spaced retrieval is. It is how the information is presented, and how people are cued to recall the information over time that allows it to be retained. People can learn; we have to teach them the right way.
Editor’s note: This Ask the Expert was adapted from the article ‘Improving Memory Using the Spaced Retrieval Technique for Occupational Therapists’. The complete article can be accessed here.