For Patients

Your brain does many things, it controls your movements, it processes emotions, it forms your personality, and it thinks – speaking a language, reading, math, putting together Legos, problem solving, and paying attention or shifting your attention to something new.

Dementia can change any of these things, your thinking, your personality, your ability to process emotions, or your ability to complete daily tasks such as bill paying, driving, following recipes, or fixing things around the house. How much of your brain is affected increases over time.

An exercise to help understand dementia.

Consider the word “construct.” What does it mean? Most everyone will say that it means “to build.”

Consider the word “deconstruct.” What does deconstruct mean? Most everyone will say that it means “to take apart.”

So we have:

• Construct - to build
• Deconstruct   to take apart

Now consider the term “mental processes.” From the moment we enter the world, our brain is busy building mental processes such as learning language, counting objects, learning how to put puzzle or Lego pieces together, labelling emotions like sad or happy, learning what motivates us, and learning what is appropriate behavior. This learning continues through school, our pursuit of hobbies, and our personal experiences throughout childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. Mental processes build over a lifetime.

Now consider “dementia.” Dementia is the taking apart of those mental processes we’ve spent out life building.*

So we have:

• Mental processes - build over a lifetime
• Dementia - takes mental processes apart

*For those interested in learning about word origins, here is a sidebar on the etymology of the word dementia.

Where mental processes are taken apart (will it be the areas responsible for language, memory, our personality, or reasoning), how quickly they are taken apart (will it be one year of intense and rapidly progressing changes, 5 years of changes, or 12 years of gradual changes), and the effects of them being taken apart differ depending on the type of dementia (Alzheimer’s, frontotemporal, other) and individual factors.

An example of individual factors would be as follows:

Two people have a dementia that starts in the area of the brain responsible for visuospatial skills. The first person, who is an architect or mechanic or carpenter or quilter, and through much practice has very strong visuospatial skills, and will likely function better for longer than someone who was never good at visuospatial skills to begin with. So your experience, your natural talents, your education, even your fitness level, nutritional intake, other illnesses, or how often you socialize with others can temper the effects of dementia for better or for worse.