Local orientation
Everyone forgets the current date now and then or makes a mistake about the time – time orientation is a relatively fragile construct. The situation is different with local and situational orientation; these are quite stable, especially in known environments. Their loss is often a sign of a larger problem, such as dementia.
The affected person finds it increasingly difficult to find his or her way around a previously frequently visited supermarket or gets lost in a district he or she knows and cannot find his or her way back home. Furthermore, situations are often misjudged. This manifests itself, for example, in completely inappropriate clothing or the misjudgement of dangerous situations.
Disturbances of language and abstract thought processes
Another important sign of dementia is speech disorders. Everyone has experienced occasional problems in finding words. Dementia patients, however, have difficulty finding even the simplest words and incorporating them meaningfully into sentences; instead they use paraphrasing or completely inappropriate words. Also typical are problems in solving more complex but everyday tasks. This is expressed, for example, in the inability to solve simple arithmetical problems or to read analogue clocks.
Personality Disorders Persönlichkeitssto
Also typical of dementia are changes in personality, which is normally a stable characteristic of a person. On the one hand, this can result in severe mood swings without any apparent reason. Dementia sufferers also tend to behave unpredictably aggressive and are very suspicious, even if they used to be friendly personalities. As the disease progresses, social withdrawal and the breaking off of social contacts thus increasingly occurs.
Aggression
Aggression often has a trigger, even in dementia patients. In their current situation, the sufferers often feel helpless and misunderstood. They often do not understand what is required of them, where they are and do not recognise their relatives and carers.
Depending on their condition and stage, the sick often recognize their own mental deterioration from time to time and feel humiliated. This causes a certain amount of stress and anxiety in those affected, which is expressed through aggression. Depending on the location of the tissue breakdown in the brain, its loss can lead to massive changes in character that can encourage aggression.
Dementia is often accompanied by psychiatric changes. This means that the state of mind is also affected by the altered metabolism in the brain caused by dementia alone. Thus, depression, numbness or psychosis are often found as a result of the brain breakdown and its metabolic state. In all cases, it is possible to intervene and improve the emotional state with various medications, but also by talking.
Hallucinations
As a concomitant disease to dementia, various other mental illnesses can occur. It is often associated with depression, insensitivity and psychosis. These psychoses can present themselves in many different ways.
Some of those affected develop hallucinations or delusional thoughts. These hallucinations can either be seen, felt or heard. In any case, they are the result of a disturbed metabolic state in the brain due to the degradation processes of dementia.
