Maybe it’s something else.
That’s what you tell yourself, isn’t it, when an older person begins to lose her memory, repeat herself, see things that aren’t there, lose her way on streets she’s traveled for decades? Maybe it’s not dementia.
And sometimes, thankfully, it is indeed some other problem, something that mimics the cognitive destruction of Alzheimer’s disease or another dementia — but, unlike them, is fixable.
“It probably happens more often than people realize,” said Dr. P. Murali Doraiswamy, a neuroscientist at Duke University Medical Center. But, he added, it doesn’t happen nearly as often as family members hope.
Several confounding cases have appeared at Duke: A woman who appeared to have Alzheimer’s actually was suffering the effects of alcoholism. Another patient’s symptoms resulted not from dementia but from chronic depression.
Dr. Doraiswamy estimates that when doctors suspect Alzheimer’s, they’re right 50 to 60 percent of the time. (The accuracy of Alzheimer’s diagnoses, even in specialized medical centers, is more haphazard than you would hope.)
Perhaps another 25 percent of patients actually have other types of dementia, like Lewy body or frontotemporal — scarcely happy news, but because these diseases have different trajectories and can be exacerbated by the wrong drugs, the distinction matters.