As you get older, one of the biggest threats to your mental/emotional health is memory loss. It can be difficult, however, to work out whether what you are experiencing is the dementia associated with Alzheimer’s disease, or whether it is the normal decline in cognitive wellness and wellbeing leading to age-related memory loss.
Forgetfulness is a normal part of the ageing process, but severe memory loss is not something that should be ignored, as it can be linked to more serious conditions. To use an example, forgetting where you have put your watch is a normal thing that can happen to most of us, but if you find you have forgotten how to tell the time, this is a more serious thing altogether. If you are forgetting major events or chunks of memorised information or abilities, there is a good chance that you could be suffering from dementia, caused by Alzheimer’s disease.
For World Alzheimer’s Day this year, the theme is ‘faces’ and the ideas is to emphasise to people that there are normal people behind every dementia patient. This is to help people understand a bit more about the disease, and understand that it can affect anyone – their parents, aunties, cousins, friends, famous people and, of course, themselves.
Startling figures have shown that Alzheimer’s disease affects 35.6 million people worldwide. It is predicted that this figure will rise to 65.7 million people by the year 2030, and 115.4 million people by the time it gets to 2050. Another report shows that men are more prone to dementia than women.
People who suffer from Alzheimer’s often seem to live in a ‘world of their own’ and are not aware of what is going on around them. They can often not remember their own names, let alone where they live or even whether they have eaten that day.
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