Relias Learning Introduces Online Training to Address Alzheimer's and ... PR Web (press release) Relias Learning, the leader in online training for senior care organizations, is pleased to announce the industry's most comprehensive set of online courses focused on dementia and Alzheimer's disease. This series follows Relias' recent release of its ... |
Day: October 29, 2013
Dementia vs. Alzheimer’s Disease
Alzheimer’s disease has taken on such mythical proportions that many people seem to think it is interchangeable with dementia. It’s not. Alzheimer’s disease is a form of dementia, just as leukaemia is a form of cancer. It’s just that, of dementia, Alzheimer’s disease is arguably the most well-known form, leading to the misconception that any and all dementia is automatically Alzheimer’s. Think of it a bit like this: all elephants are grey, but not all grey things are elephants.
So what makes Alzheimer’s disease “special” in the world of dementia? Symptoms of dementia usually don’t occur before the age of 65, so it makes sense for dementia to be characterized as an “elderly disease”. Alzheimer’s follows this pattern – most people don’t start having weird memory problems until they’re in their 70s – but if what those people have is indeed Alzheimer’s, it actually began about 30 years before they ever started exhibiting symptoms. Think about it: if people in their 60s, right around retirement age, are eventually diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, that means they actually started down this degenerative road in their early 30s. No wonder the genetic risk for Alzheimer’s is a big deal: people’s brains are actively changing for the worse, and they’re having children right around the same time. It’s much different than someone who, long after babymaking years, hit his or her head in a car accident and started forgetting things more often.
What Is Dementia?
There’s quite a bit of misunderstanding about what dementia is exactly. The short definition is that dementia is an umbrella term for any degenerative condition of the brain. In a purely word-comparison context, the word dementia is not that different cancer. But like cancer, dementia can be split into very specific conditions, depending on the quality and rate of degeneration or causes of dementia – just like cancer can be split into the different regions or tissues of the body, and particular risk factors can be pinpointed according to each type of cancer. The biggest misconception about dementia is that it is a natural part of ageing – which it’s not. Dementia is preventable in so many ways, but because people have systematically refused to change certain aspects of their lifestyles, the resulting dementia has taken on a fatalistic image.