The latest studies have revealed that people with dementia often perform poorly for a few years before diagnosis. What the experts found.
There is always a lot of talk about neurological problems like dementia or pathologies like the disease Alzheimer or that of Parkinson – which unfortunately today do not have a definitive cure.
Despite the research in this sense, therefore, are more or less at a dead end, the experts obviously continued to analyze the symptoms and recently discovered that people affected by these pathologies were less performing for some time before receiving the diagnosis.
Dementia and neurodegenerative diseases: where we are
At the moment, therefore, there are no effective treatments against neurodegenerative diseases, for which those who receive diagnoses such as dementia or diseases such as Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s disease – above all because degeneration of neuronal cells usually begins even decades earlier and it is possible to identify the disease only once that the damage has already advanced.
Therefore, although at the moment these pathologies have irreversible effects, there is a lot of talk about prevention, especially in the case of familiarity – that is, if a relative of ours has had this type of pathology.
Dementia: Symptoms begin much earlier than expected
However, there are, to all intents and purposes, some signals that can be useful to understand if a subject will develop forms of dementia or neurodegenerative diseases – according to the latest studies conducted by theUniversity of Cambridge and recently published in the magazine Alzheimer’s & Dementia: The Journal of the Alzheimer’s Association.
In fact, it seems that the patients who then developed this type of disease had for some time already had various difficulties in some areas. Analyzing the tests conducted on half a million people it was noted that subjects in the future suffering from diseases such as dementia and the like had difficulty in solving questionnaires based on problem solving or memory.
The same problems were also found for tests with reaction times to external stimuli (especially in the case of hand grip strength). Finally, a certain correlation with balance problems was also noted – future patients had fallen at least once.
The study represents a big step forward in terms of prevention, especially to ensure that patients can change their habits and try to reduce the risk or otherwise monitor the progress of the disease.