Angelica Owens 5 minutes of Science- Dementia

For my project, I focused on Dementia. Dementia is a disorder that causes you to lose your memory. When you have dementia, the cortex shrivels up and that damages the areas involved in thinking, planning and remembering. Shrinkage increases in the hippocampus which is an area that works on creating new memories and the ventricles grow larger. The symptoms are loss of memory, hard time communicating and language, the ability to focus and pay attention, reasoning and judgement and visual perception. To diagnose it, doctors do physical examination, careful medication history, lab tests, characteristics changes in history, day-to-day function and behavioral associated with each type. 

For Society, A lot of people can be diagnosed with it under 65 years old,  other terms are “early onset dementia”, “young onset dementia” and “working age dementia”. In the U.S, 5 million are reported to have age related dementia and in Louisiana about 100,000 have it. 1 in 6 women and 1 in 10 who live past 55 will develop dementia in their lifetime. People with often have to have a care provider since they can’t take of themselves. 

For Self, I chose to do this project because my grandmother had it for a while. She was declining rapidly. I don’t like this because there were times where my grandmother didn’t even know who I was and kept asking who I was. I would see her struggle to remember things and to try to take care of her. Two of my great aunt’s, my grandmother sisters have it too so I wanted to find out if it is genetic.