Causes of vascular dementia
Sheila said that her Mum took Prednisolone steroids. My Mum has taken quite high dosages of this steroid for years to help her Rheumatoid Arthritis. She has tried to reduce the dose from 7.5mg. but nothing else works as well and she reacts badly to other drugs. She has never smoked, rarely drinks, just the occaisonal glass of wine or sherry and has always eaten a reasonable diet with plenty of fruit and vegetables.
I think the long term use of steroids (25 years) may well be the cause of her vascular dementia as well as her osteoporosis, which has resulted in two fractures in her arms and a broken hip, which landed her in a nursing home.
She is capable of a lucid conversation and was playing Upwords with me this afternoon. She has lost all sense of time and is living in the past, which causes her to not realise who people are. How can she have a daughter if she is reliving the War years as a teenager herself? She has been very depressed, with floods of tears, as she remembers afresh loved ones who have died or gone away.
The most disturbing part of her illness are the hallucinations, but sometimes these may bring her some comfort and she is not necessarily afraid of them. My (deceased) father "dives" under the bed when the nurse comes in. She decided to try and "cook the dinner" because "Ray said he'd do it and I don't like his cooking".
She talks about "playing in our minds" as if she realises that it is all a figment of her imagination. One day she talked about looking down on her life " like a ladder with sixty rungs" and she said that "you can join it anywhere, starting life as a little girl and ending up as an old lady." Although she is struggling to find the right words, I am convinced she is still the same person inside and is probably fed up with with being treated as some one with dementia. Reading about other cases on TP, I'm really not sure that Mum has the same type of illness, because in many ways she is still quite intelligent if she can just find a way to communicate to others.
Initially, she was in the dementia section of the home but they moved her to the general nursing because her physical needs were greater. The nurses have been surprised at some of the things she has been able to say to them. A lot of people seem to become ill after having treatment for serious diseases, so maybe other drugs are also a factor in vascular dementia.