My mum has just been diagnosed with dementia. She is still undergoing tests to find out what type of dementia it is and to determine the correct type of treatment. She is 75 years old and my dad who is 71 and my sister will be caring for her.
She has been confused and somewhat absent minded for years and even when we were children she was a little bit like that. I was wondering if anyone knows if it is something that she could have been suffering with for a long time?
It's hard to say for sure because getting a diagnosis in the very early stages can be tricky as lots if things can impact on memory etc. So it's possible that earlier in life your mum was 'absent minded' for some reason other than dementia.
Having said that I first had real concerns about my mum's memory and paranoia about 20 years ago, maybe even further back, when she was in her early 50s. I even went to see her (and my at the time as it happened) GP about it all that time ago. The doctor said that it might be early onset dementia but my mum would've had to have gone in herself to explore that further and that wasn't going to happen so I left it. My relationship with her was definitely affected and my husband and I had to learn to manage her behaviours to enable her to have a relationship with our boys. Throughout all that time she did however manage to run her business and travelled a lot so whatever was up with her wasn't an out and out problem, more of a background thing.
Years later, after an Alzheimer's diagnosis, I asked her consultant about it and her opinion was that my mum probably suffered from a delusional disorder throughout her life, with episodes managed by the family as 'one of those things', with the Alzheimer's coming along later. I'm still not completely convinced, though, because the memory holes way back then we're just like the dementia ones that became really apparent when she got older. They were just less frequent then... I suppose they could've been caused by the stress of the delusions, on the other hand if some other specialist said that it had always been dementia, early onset and very slow progressing, I would've said yes, that makes sense.
Not an answer to your question but I thought I'd share my experience.