Vascular dementia is caused by a hardening of the blood vessels in the brain which results in poor blood flow to the brain and damage (and sometimes death) of some of the brain cells. If an area of brain dies, a stroke occurs. Therefore, this form of dementia can be caused by a stroke. In the 1970s it was considered that to have vascular dementia you needed to suffer one or two big strokes. However, it has become apparent over the last 20 years that people can have vascular dementia without having had strokes and the onset of progression in this situation can be quite slow and insidious, rather like Alzheimer’s disease. Even if someone has a stroke, it does not necessarily give rise to any symptoms, and it can often be found as an incidental finding on a brain scan, or even after someone has died, at post\u00c2\u00admortem. It is important to differentiate people with vascular dementia from people with Alzheimer’s disease, because the treatment is very different. There are a few tell-tale signs that people may have vascular dementia. The symptoms may start very quickly and tend to vary from day to day. At times., people will say that a relative appears to be back to normal. There may be a history of a stroke or a transient ischaemic attack (a mini-stroke where the symptoms last less then 24 hours). A person may have a history of high blood pressure or heart disease, raised cholesterol, or diabetes. About 20 per cent of people with dementia have vascular dementia. Alzheimer’s disease and vascular dementia can exist together in the same person.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Vascular dementia is caused by a hardening of the blood vessels in the brain which results in poor blood flow to the brain and damage (and sometimes death) of some of the brain cells. If an area of brain dies, a stroke occurs. Therefore, this form of dementia can be caused by a stroke. In … Continue reading “Vascular dementia”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-26","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-diseases-and-condition"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.health-care-clinic.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.health-care-clinic.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.health-care-clinic.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.health-care-clinic.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.health-care-clinic.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.health-care-clinic.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":363,"href":"https:\/\/www.health-care-clinic.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26\/revisions\/363"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.health-care-clinic.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.health-care-clinic.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.health-care-clinic.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}