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Dementia can take a real toll on families. When a loved one begins losing treasured memories, forgetting names, and even mistaking the identities of close relatives, it is heartbreaking for everybody involved. And in cases of dementia-related psychosis where hallucinations and delusions cause a patient to believe things that aren’t real these episodes can be scary and confusing to witness.
“Seeing a family member’s behavior change in such a profound way has a direct impact on relationships,” says Angela Lunde, neurology associate and co-investigator of the Outreach, Recruitment and Engagement Core in the Mayo Clinic Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center in Rochester, MN. This is especially true for young children, who don’t necessarily understand dementia and how it affects someone’s brain. “For children, it can be hard to navigate seeing a grandparent in a way they haven’t seen before,” Lunde explains. “Unless a child has good guidance and understanding in terms
The anecdotes Lauren Nicholas was hearing were all similarly alarming: People with dementia were experiencing âcatastrophic financial eventsâ â often before they or their loves ones knew there was anything wrong with them.
âOnce you miss a bunch of payments, the bank owns your house or you canât get credit anymore, so I think we were kind of concerned about why this is able to happen,â said Nicholas, a health economist and associate professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
Deteriorating financial capabilities have long been considered one of the earliest signs of cognitive decline, but Nicholas noted that experts still had ârelatively limited understanding of how frequent it is and when itâs happening.â