Senile Dementia is a steady decline of mental faculties in a person, primarily elderly, for various reasons including Alzheimer's disease and strokes. Watch this video for more information on this condition.
JUSTIN C.K. DAVIS, M.D.: Hi. My name is Dr. Justin Davis, and today we will be discussing senile dementia. Now what is senile dementia? Well first of all, the word senile refers to people of old age, so senile dementia always happens in elderly people. The term dementia refers to a steady decline in mental functioning and the ability to reason or have a stable emotional state. This is more likely to happen in elderly people, but there are a variety of reasons why it may happen. Some of the more common reasons of senile dementia are Alzheimer's disease, which affects many Americans and continues to be on the rise. Other reasons may be for example mini strokes that may occur undetected in elderly people that leave them slightly impaired. Now usually, this is a progressive problem, so it does not happen all of a sudden, but little by little it seems to get worse and worse. The symptoms are typically forgetfulness, perhaps a change in personality, not being able to function the way that they used to function. You may notice this, but sometimes it is not as easy to notice as you would think because it happens slowly over time. What do we do about this? Unfortunately, sometimes it goes a long with aging and there is really nothing that can be done to completely stop it. But there are some things that we can do to try to prevent it such as keeping the mind active as you are aging, eating healthy, remaining active physically, taking multivitamins, particularly antioxidants and some herbal supplements, and in some cases there have actually been some new medicines that have been developed that will help the process to slow dementia. There are also a number of medicines that you can take to prevent things such as mini strokes by controlling heart disease and blood pressure. Now, if you think that you may know somebody that is experiencing an onset of symptoms of dementia, it is very important to let their physician know because it may be dementia or there could be something else causing this. Particularly if it seems to happen all of a sudden, it is especially important to let a doctor know right away, because it may not be dementia at all, it may be something called delirium, which happens only temporarily and is reversible if you take away the underlying cause. So, if you think perhaps that you are experiencing some symptoms of dementia or forgetfulness, it could be normal but it also is important to bring this to the attention of a trained professional and especially, if you think you know somebody or perhaps a loved one is experiencing symptoms of dementia or declining in mental faculty, it is especially important to let their doctor know right away so that treatment and proper diagnoses can get underway immediately.
