Management of Dementia PDF

Preface

The first edition of Management of Dementia has proven to be very useful to clinicians caring for persons with Alzheimer's disease and related disorders. Since 2001, there has been steady progress in this field, and all chapters have been updated with a clinical perspective based on the best available evidence.

The diagnostic criteria of Parkinson's disease dementia have been added to chapter 1. Behavioural disturbances cause a lot of distress to patients and caregivers, and continue to be a major management problem for clinicians, with considerable uncertainty as to the best overall approaches; we offer our advice in chapter 2 for the most troublesome behaviours, depression, psychosis and agitation, and in chapter 3 for sleep disturbances. Chapter 4 gives an update on the many genetic findings in Alzheimer's disease, Frontotemporal dementia and dementia with Lewy bodies. Chapter 5 on biological markers is complementary to chapter 1 on diagnosis. Chapters 6 and 7 on symptomatic and disease-modifying treatments discuss available drugs and potential preventive or stabilizing treatments. Chapter 8 offers advice for managing the difficult later stages of dementia in long-term care. Chapter 9 has been updated to include new assessment scales. Chapter 10 is a perspective on the management of dementia in the near future using primary and secondary prevention and drug treatments selected for individual patients with specific causes of dementia, treatments possibly based on the individual's phenotypic and genetic features.

We think that the care of persons with dementia and their caregivers has improved greatly in the past two decades, and we hope that this book will help further. We are not far from offering evidence-based prevention advice for persons at risk.