From Volume 42, Issue 5, June 2015 | Pages 464-472
Dementia is increasing in prevalence: by 2025 it is estimated that there will be over a million people in the UK with this diagnosis. The condition is likely to affect us all as healthcare providers, whether in our patients, our relatives or ourselves. This article gives an overview of dementia: causes, treatment, how it affects people and provides advice on how to manage patients with dementia who require dental care.
Dementia is one of the biggest health challenges facing the NHS in the UK and is recognized as a global time bomb. It is estimated that there will be over a million people with dementia in the UK by 2025.1 The G8 summit in London December 2013 made a commitment to ‘significantly increase the amount spent on dementia research, to identify a cure, or a disease modifying therapy by 2025 and to develop an international action plan for research’. David Cameron announced care quality measures to improve the quality of care provided in hospitals for people with dementia.2
The ICD-10 defines dementia ‘as a disorder with deterioration in both memory and thinking which is sufficient to impair personal activities of daily living. The impairment of memory is noted to typically affect the registration, storage and retrieval of new information. The definition requires that the patients have deficits in thinking and reasoning in addition to the memory disturbance’.3
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