Dr. Majid Fotuhi

And that's a typical story of someone with vascular dementia.

Vascular dementia is more common in people who have vascular risk factors, hypertension, diabetes.

high cholesterol, those risk factors contribute to heart failure.

And some people may have congestive heart failure for too much alcohol or a viral etiology.

That's an example of vascular dementia.

And it's very sad to see that somebody who was communicating with you and was a person all of a sudden doesn't know what year it is.

And they ask for their spouse, even though she had passed away years ago.

It's very difficult for family members to have that interaction.

If a person asks the same question over again, but they're able to live by themselves alone or have a need very little assistance that would be called mild cognitive impairment.

It's not mild because obviously it's a person asking so many questions, but if she also can't drive anymore, then it's not MCI anymore.

It's not my cognitive impairment anymore.

It's possibly Alzheimer's disease.

However, we can't be sure it's Alzheimer's disease.

A mistake a lot of people make is to assume that if somebody has memory problems, they must have Alzheimer's disease.

Sometimes a person may have significant depression, vitamin deficiency, poor sleep, congestive heart failure, because the repeating of the question doesn't say what caused it.

It just says that the part of the brain that's important for acquiring new information

which is called hippocampus is not working.

Even in the case of vascular dementia, and the front of the brain is damaged, but the part of the brain for memory, the hippocampus is also affected.

So in her case, she needs to have an evaluation to determine what may have contributed to damage to her hippocampus.

There's a strong possibility that it may be Alzheimer's disease after all, but we can't be sure until she has further evaluations.