Treatment and Management of Senile Dementia

There are about sixty to seventy diseases which develop dementia until now. These include degenerative disease, vascular disease, infectious disease, hydrocephalus, toxic condition, head trauma, tumor , metabolic disease, and demyelinating disease etc. 20% of dementing illness is reversible to treatment. Treatment strategies of dementia can be classified as disease-specific treatment, pharmacotherapy with neurocognitive activators or psychopharmacologic agents, and nonpharmacologic intervention such as neurocognitive rehabilitation, reminiscence therapy, occupational or physical therapy, and psychosocial approach. But medical approach is necessary to prevent disability stemming from pneumonia, dehydration, malnutrition, decubitus ulcer, and other complication. These treatment strategies must be administered comprehensibly due to characteristics of the dementia patients.

Symptomatology of Dementia

Dementia can be defined as an acquired persistent impairment of intellectual func-tion with compromise in at least three of the mental activities such as language, memory, visuospatial skill, emotion or personality, and cognition. The purposes of diagnosing a dementia syndrome are to search systemically for various etiologies, to differentiate reversible or irreversible dementia, cortical or subcortical dementia, and degenerative or nondegenerative dementia, and to apply to patients neurocognitive rehabilitation or other specific trea-tment strategies. The evaluation of dementia includes neuropsychiatric history taking, neuropsychological assessment, neurologic examination, neuroimaging studies, and laboratory studies. It is impossible to evaluate dementic patients only with clinical signs, symptoms, and neuropsychiatric histories. But I will address specific neurologic or neuropsychiatric symptoms and signs of various dementias to und-erstand them as classification.