It came as a message on facebook. Someone I knew spoke of how their mother had passed due to Alzheimer’s Dementia (AD), and yet, now, years later, they began to realize it was Lewy Body Dementia (LBD). It had me thinking: ‘How prevalent are these misdiagnoses between dementias?’ And, ‘What are the real causes of the symptoms, if they aren’t dementia, or if they’re another type?’
Well, the second question could be answered quite easily, as stated in A Startling Cause of Misdiagnosed Dementia, from the webpage Aplaceformom.com. What the author asserts in this article is that too many seniors are prescribed medications and they can abuse those doses - from either side effects or simply forgetting they took or didn’t take them. The diagnosis, after assessing the same symptoms as differing forms of dementia is that they do have dementia - until they come under some form of structured observation and the realization that the meds were to blame appears. But that’s just one.
The next article I found, Misdiagnosis of Dementia, from Rightdiagnosis.com, has a great number of reasons for the misdiagnoses: Tumor, Adult ADHD, Stroke, Medications, Thyroid Disease, Vitamin B Deficiency, among others. There are also the mistakes made when looking at the patient and believing that many of the causes for the symptoms may be related to aging (this is what we assumed with Mom, along with her medications). This is, indeed, an interesting and vital article to investigate if you have any curiosity on the topic.
Another article, Reversible dementia and the misdiagnosis of dementia: a …, published by the National Institutes of Health, announces that 10-33% of patients diagnosed with dementia have some reversible form - due to medications, or other cause for the symptoms, from medical to psychiatric. How’s that!
Now, Lewy Body Dementia (LBD) may take 18 months and 3 doctors to reach a diagnosis - and this usually happens when the patient is in the severe stages of the disease, according to the LBDA.org in the article Most Misdiagnosed Form of Dementia Leaves Patients …. This piece of literature gives us the awful feeling that the patient and the caregiver or family needs to do their homework, as most physicians haven’t a clue as to what LBD is (such as it was with Mom’s primary after her diagnosis - so we fired her and found someone who had done their homework).
There are many other articles available, and I’ll try to put them at the bottom of this post. But it is really intriguing that as the population ages that medicine is trying to catch up to the needs and problems that will be quite widespread in only a few years.
I suppose this may bring more questions than it answers, so this could become something that propels me further along. So, until next time, keep reading and learning!
Articles:
Rabins, Peter V. "Reversible dementia and the misdiagnosis of dementia: a review." Psychiatric Services 34.9 (1983): 830-835.
Ryan, DH. "Misdiagnosis in dementia: comparisons of diagnostic error rate and range of hospital investigation according to medical specialty." International journal of geriatric psychiatry 9.2 (1994): 141-147.
McKeith, Ian G et al. "The clinical diagnosis and misdiagnosis of senile dementia of Lewy body type (SDLT)." The British Journal of Psychiatry 165.3 (1994): 324-332.
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