Cognitive Health Assessment Programme

Details

About Dementia

Dementia is a disease that impacts brain functions. Patients would experience a significant and ongoing decline in cognitive abilities, including memory, judgment, and language ability, with no course of action to reverse the condition or cure the disease. According to statistics from the Hong Kong Hospital Authority, about 5-8 out of every 100 elderly people over 65 years old suffer from this disease; and among the elderly over 80 years old, 20-30% of them suffer from dementia to varying degrees.

Dementia is a syndrome that can be caused by multiple brain diseases for which pathological changes will start to occur in the brain cells of patients. Common subtypes include:

Alzheimer’s disease：The most common type of dementia. A neurodegenerative disease where patients suffer from a progressive decline in cognitive ability, while the cause remains unknown.

Cerebrovascular dementia：The second most common type of dementia. A kind of brain damage caused by stroke or other vascular diseases. The cognitive abilities of patients would display regressive decline, which means that every time a patient has a stroke, the brain function will have further degeneration.

Other diseases：Includes dementia with Lewy bodies, frontotemporal dementia, hypothyroidism, neurosyphilis, alcohol-related cognitive impairment, and lack of vitamin B12, etc.

Risk Factor

Age：Individuals aged 65 or above are more likely to suffer from dementia. The older the age, the higher the risk.

Gender：Women are generally more likely to develop dementia than men.

Lifestyle：People with high blood pressure, high cholesterol and diabetes may have a greater risk of developing dementia.

Heredity factors：If an individual’s immediate family members suffer from dementia, the chance of developing the disease will also increase.