It has been believed for a long time that human’s memory starts to deteriorate as soon as he starts his sixties. However, recent studies have shown that the first expression dementia (brain malfunctioning) may start as soon as human becomes 45 years old.
Dementia (translated as madness in Latin) is a clinical syndrome which can be described as thinking disorder. It affects human’s memory (and later leads to its loss), orientation, perceptual and other cognitive functions. There are more and more people suffering from dementia: it has been found that approximately 5-9 % of people older than 65 years are having some of the symptoms of dementia, while 10-12 % of people who are 75-79 years old and 20-25 % of people who are 80-90 years old are also affected by this sneaky disease. This data has been found after various tests including about 10 000 of volunteers (5 thousand of men and two thousand of women) worldwide.
In medical terms, dementia is divided into primary and secondary. The primary dementia is also divided into degenerative, vascular and mixed. The true example of degenerative dementia is Alzheimer’s disease which is diagnosed for 50-75 % of people affected by degenerative dementia. For example, there are about 1 million of people suffering from Alzheimer ‘s disease in Germany while 4 million of people – in U.S.
According to doctors, dementia slowly changes human’s personality and leads him to the loss of feelings, shame, conscience and responsibility. Because of dementia, patients unnoticeably lose their attention and memory, so they finally find themselves incapable to keep new information in their mind. It has been also researched that patients become moody, irritable, angry or very cheerful because of this disease.