As a clinician, my answer to queries is that Alzheimer’s dementia is only one type of dementia and that not all dementias are Alzheimer’s. Aside from Alzheimer’s disease, other dementias exist such as Dementia with lewy body, Vascular dementia, Parkinson’s disease with dementia, and dementias due to various neurologic and medical conditions.

How will you know if a person is suffering from Alzheimer’s dementia? What is Alzheimer’s dementia?

Alzheimer’s dementia is a neurologic disorder characterized by a progressive and irreversible cognitive decline associated with impairment in functioning. The cognitive deterioration consists of memory impairment. Initially there is recent memory impairment but as disease progresses, even long term memory is affected.

In addition to memory impairment, a patient with dementia has impairment in one of four cognitive areas: aphasia, apraxia, agnosia, and impairment in executive functioning. Aphasia is a problem in language characterized by inability to express oneself, repeat words or phrases, or understand what is being said. Apraxia is inability to adequately perform a usual motor activity such as combing hair or brushing teeth despite no paralysis or musculoskeletal abnormality.

Thank god for doctors and for antibiotics. They save millions of lives every year, but there is a dark side to use of antibiotics that is not quite so well known. For example, did you know that there is a commonly used antibiotic that can kill, like ecstasy, on very first dose you take?

The trouble with antibiotics is that they are just so good at what they do, that we start begging for antibiotics as soon as we get ill, and doctors who are already under huge pressures at work just don’t have time to argue. It’s easier to give in, and as likely as not antibiotic will do job, and not kill you.

Side-effects However, most antibiotics have some adverse effects, and side-effects of some commonly used antibiotics can be very dangerous. Plus, bugs that typically affect us are growing more and more resistant to antibiotics, with result that there are now E.coli bugs, like potentially deadly strain, 0157:H7 that are resistant to almost everything medically available, including broad-spectrum antibiotics.

If that’s not enough to make you think twice, there is also effect that antibiotics have on your immune system. When your body defeats an attack by a bug it becomes stronger, and will probably always defeat that bug. However, every time you take a course of antibiotics, you are taking away your immune system’s power.

The dilemma is that you may need to take them to save your life, for example if your kidney is compromised by a bacterial infection. But once you’ve taken broad-spectrum antibiotics, and they no longer work for you, your options become extremely limited. Doctors end up having to prescribe huge doses of antibiotics with cumulative side-effects so dangerous that you may suffer for rest of your life as a result. Not to mention damage to your immune system.

Cost of Treatment and How you are Affected The bugs that affect us mutate so often that no two infections are same. This means that antibiotics should ideally be tested against a laboratory grown culture of your infection to see which will be most effective. Using a targeted antibiotic that has been tested to see if it kills your particular infection is like using a ‘magic bullet’. It will be highly effective, and have fewer side-effects than a broad-spectrum antibiotic.

However, this is expensive. It is cheaper for doctor to prescribe an antibiotic that is known to be fairly effective against most typical infections that cause similar symptoms to those you are experiencing. The results won’t be as good as a targeted antibiotic, side-effects will probably be worse, and one in five people will probably still have infection after six weeks because of this strategy, but it’s a less expensive option for NHS than having to pay for detailed lab tests. It’s also faster to treat you this way, so if it works for you, you are one less patient to have to deal with next week.

The Dangers As an example of dangers of broad-spectrum treatment, some of side-effects of fluoroquinolene based antibiotics often used against resistant infections include joint pain and tendon tearing, fluorodosis (fluorine poisoning) heart attack, heart murmur, palpitations, angina, cerebral thrombosis, sudden death on first dose, liver failure, jaundice, gastrointestinal bleeding, diarrhoea, ulcerative colitis, burst intestine, vomiting, constipation, irritable bowel syndrome, anaphylactic shock, skin dying or falling off, dermatitis, vasculitis, angioedema, swelling of lips, eyes, or face, fever, chills, lupus, and going purple.