Definition, and Epidemiology of Dementia: A Review

Abstract

Dementia is a disorder of the brain. The behavioural changes in dementia are not under conscious control, nor are they due to laziness or “letting go”. Dementia must have been affecting people ever since humans began to survive in appreciable numbers into old age. But it is a condition that has come into prominence only during the late twentieth century, because of the unprecedented increase in the numbers of people all over the world who survive to become very elderly. Early in the nineteenth century, Esquirol gave a succinct definition of dementia drawing attention not only to the cognitive features of the disorder, with impairment of memory and thinking in day‐to‐day life, but also to its..