After Alzheimer’s, this neurodegenerative disease is the second most frequent, it is characterized by the subject presenting memory deficit, decreased selective attention, and executive functions and 30 to 40% debut with dementia, it also affects verbal fluency, slowing of language generation, reading and writing deficit due to motor impairment, a slowing of thinking also occurs.
Symptoms
Among the neurological symptoms suffered by these patients are: tremors at rest, rigidity, bradykinesia, postural instability, festinating gait.
The symptoms of this disease in the autonomic nervous system are dysphagia, sweating, salivation, presenting a decrease in cognitive functions leads to dementia.
Causes
The explanation for Parkinson’s dementia has three explanations: the existence of lesions in the brain stem, substantia nigra and locus coeruleus, raphe nuclei and cholinergic neurons, another explanation is the presence of diffuse cortical and limbic pathology due to the presence of Lewy bodies. and finally, comorbidity with Alzheimer’s causes the symptoms to overlap, making it difficult to diagnose due to the presence of tau protein, a characteristic of Alzheimer’s.
From a neurological point of view, dopaminergic dysfunction causes cognitive impairment in these patients.
Sycosis
The psychotic symptoms of these patients vary from visual, auditory, gustatory or olfactory allusions to delusions. When these symptoms start early, they are associated with Lewy body dementia.
Importance of this post
The practical importance of this scientific information is that to coexist and help in daily life with these patients, one must know that all antiparkinsonian medications, whether dopamine agonists, levodopa, monoamine oxidase inhibitors, and anticholinergics, can cause hallucinations and psychosis, especially dopamine agonists.
Tips
If the patients are over 80 years of age, urinary infections must also be prevented by encouraging the patient to drink 2 liters of water daily, avoiding prolonged periods of time with diapers containing urine or feces, taking care when cleaning their genitals prevent anal bacteria from reaching the urethra, since they cause recurrent urinary infections that cause states of confusion and delirium, changes in mood and behavior, decrease in daily activities, incontinence and insomnia.
I hope you liked this post, whether you are a caregiver or family member of someone who suffers from Parkinson’s in which dementia can be a consequence of it.
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