Dementia For Dummies - UK

Introduction

Pick up a newspaper or turn on the television or radio, and it won’t be long before you come across a reference to dementia. Either there’s been a breakthrough in research, or someone famous has been diagnosed with it, or an expert has decided that some food or other, which we’ve previously enjoyed without a second thought, is now believed to double our risk of developing the condition.

But its media popularity isn’t really that much of a shock, because dementia is on the rise. In fact, it’s reckoned that every four seconds someone somewhere in the world is diagnosed with dementia, so the number of cases is rising pretty fast.

At the moment, the World Health Organization estimates that 35.6 million people have dementia across the globe, with 7.7 million cases being added every 12 months. And closer to home, the number of people in the UK with dementia is thought to be 820,000, which, according to Alzheimer’s Research UK, means that 23 million of us will know a close friend or family member who has been diagnosed with it.

Sadly, those figures mean that a lot of people are, or will be, directly affected by dementia.

About This Book

The scope of this book is extremely wide ranging, covering the basics of how each of the four diseases that cause dementia develop, along with an explanation of the changes that happen in the brain to cause the disease’s disabling symptoms. I look at the treatments available, both from mainstream medicine and complementary therapies, and ...