11/17/2025
🧠 What Is Dementia?
Dementia isn’t a single disease — it’s a general term for symptoms that affect memory, reasoning, and thinking skills severely enough to impact daily life.
It can affect one or more of these 6 key brain functions:
🗣️ Language — communicating & understanding
🧩 Executive Function — planning, problem-solving, decision-making
🎯 Attention — staying focused despite distractions
🚶♀️ Perceptual-Motor — coordinating movement & senses
💬 Social Cognition — empathy, impulse control, social awareness
📚 Learning & Memory — recording & retrieving information
💡 Dementia vs. Alzheimer’s:
Think of dementia as an umbrella term for these symptoms. Alzheimer’s disease is just one cause — others include vascular, Lewy body, and frontotemporal dementias.
🧩 Every case of Alzheimer’s is dementia, but not every dementia is Alzheimer’s.
