When you have taken on the role of a caregiver, it is important to personalize and adjust your care to best suit the health conditions and lifestyle preferences of your loved one. This makes it important to understand the difference between conditions that affects a person’s cognitive abilities like dementia and delirium. It might be intuitive to place more importance on physical conditions like high blood pressure or diabetes, but cognitive changes can have just as large an impact on a person’s wellbeing.
This is largely because conditions that affect an individual’s cognitive abilities can alter their ability to remember, think, or reason. While this is more common as we grow older, it is not a part of natural aging, and it is important to address these problems as soon as possible to secure a better quality of living for your loved one.
To get you started, we have compiled a simple breakdown of the differences between delirium and dementia, what they do and how it manifests in different people.
What Is Delirium?
Delirium refers to sudden states of confusion and a drastic disturbance in the individual’s behavior, mood, and thought processes. In other words, when your loved one is experiencing delirium, they may no longer act like the person that you used to know. This can manifest in ways like mood changes, changes in sleeping habits, alteration of speech patterns or even visual hallucination and physical problems.
What Is Dementia?
Dementia refers to a progressive degenerative condition that affects an individual’s ability to reason, think, and remember information. The symptoms will present themselves over time in ways like memory loss, increased difficulty taking care of themselves and problem-solving. It can also affect their ability to focus. Alzheimer’s Disease is the most common condition that causes dementia.
Key Differences between Dementia and Delirium
One of the key differences between the two is the speed at which they manifest. Delirium is likely to have a sudden onset and can be treated and stopped with efficient treatment. On the other hand, dementia is a long-term condition where symptoms will develop over years and is unlikely to completely go away even with continuous treatment.
Get Medical Support at Mariposa
Here at Mariposa, we understand that coping with these issues can be hard for people with no medical background. This is especially so if you are having to juggle work or other commitments while acting as a caregiver. It is important that you and your loved one know that you are not alone in this journey.
At Mariposa, all our team members are fully certified and professionally trained to provide assistance for a wide range of cognitive and physical conditions. This means being able to catch any further deterioration and also leveraging on specialized programs that are designed to minimize the impact of said conditions. On top of this, we have team members that are able to provide round-the-clock care and convenient amenities like fitness centers, libraries, and even a movie theatre.
For more information on our senior living community and how we support residents with dementia and delirium, contact us today.