Dementia Care

ABC Of Dementia

What is Dementia?

Dementia is not a specific disease, but is rather a syndrome characterized by deterioration in a person’s cognitive function. Often, this cognitive decline affects multiple domain including thinking ability, behavior, and ability to perform daily tasks. The commonest sign of dementia is poor short term memory, whereby the person will have difficulties recalling recent events, misplaces belongings, forgetting names of familiar contacts and asking questions repetitively. They may also have troubles understanding spatial relationships like judging distance, forgetting directions easily getting lost in familiar places and disorientation. 

People living with dementia will find it difficult to make complex decisions, they may lose the ability to perform certain task that they were good at, some may have language impairment such as word finding difficulties. In later stages of the disease, 80% of people living with dementia may experience mood and behavioural changes such as apathy (lack of motivation), agitation, aggression, depression or anxiety. 

Dementia has many types, and Alzheimer’s dementia is the most common type of dementia. There are also other subtypes of dementia such as vascular dementia, Lewy Body dementia, and frontotemporal dementia

How Common is Dementia?

Malaysia’s population in 2019 was estimated at 32.6 million. The proportion of older adults in the country had increased steadily from 4.6% in 1957 to 5.7% in 1990. It is also predicted that the proportion will continue to increase from 6.3% in 2000 to 12% by the year 2030.3 The details are shown in Figure 1
Figure 1: Past, present and future trends of senior citizens, Malaysia 1960-2030. Source: Department of Statistics, Malaysia
With the rising number of older population, there will inevitably be an increase in older adults with dementia. The latest National Health and Morbidity Survey 2018 of Malaysia showed that the prevalence of dementia was 8.5% amongst those aged 60 years and above. The prevalence of dementia was higher in those living in rural areas, females, those with no formal education and lower income levels.
According to the Alzheimer Disease International report, the prevalence of dementia in Malaysia was estimated to be 63,000 people in 2005 with annual new cases of 20,100. This number was projected to be 126,800 people by 2020 with annual new cases of 39,000 and 453,900 people by 2050 with annual new cases of 138,800.
Contents reviewed by Dr Khor Hui Min, Consultant Geriatric, University Malaya Medical Center and Dr. Elizabeth Chong Gar Mit, Consultant Geriatric, Hospital Kuala Lumpur
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