Understanding Senile Dementia: Symptoms, Causes & Risk Factors

Senile dementia occurs when intellectual function is impaired by the progressive degeneration of brain cells. This results in a gradual loss of memory and cognitive ability, as well as personality changes.

Common Disease Causes

• Senile dementia can result from an underlying disease, such as Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, Wilson's, Huntington's, Creutzfeld-Jakob, HIV, multiple sclerosis and brain tumors.

Other Causes

• Senile dementia can also be caused by conditions such as poor nutrition, steroid abuse, depression and alcoholism.

Early-Stage Symptoms

• The patient may find it difficult to remember recent events and become confused about time, place, and direction. Other symptoms include personality changes, impaired judgment, passivity, difficulty in reasoning and calculation.

Middle Stage

• Symptoms progress as dementia worsens. There may be emotional instability, loss of cognitive, learning and reasoning ability, loss of day-to-day coping skills, and inability to distinguish between night and day.

Late Stage

• The patient may suffer the loss of all cognitive ability, walk unsteadily, become incontinent and no longer able to care for him or herself, lose weight over time, and may become confined to bed