When a person experiences symptoms that affect their social abilities, thinking, and memory, they may be experiencing dementia. Dementia isn’t caused by a specific disease but rather it’s an umbrella term that characterizes several cognitive conditions (i.e., Alzheimer’s Disease, Vascular Dementia, Dementia With Lewy Bodies (DLB), Parkinson’s Disease Dementia, Mixed Dementia, Frontotemporal Dementia (FTD), Huntington’s Disease, and Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease).

All forms of dementia are progressive, meaning the disease affects the structure and chemistry of the brain as time progresses. While the following symptoms often accompany most types of dementia, the rate of progression largely depends on the individual patient and the treatment. Here are some of the most common early warning symptoms of dementia.

1. Memory loss

Memory troubles are always part of the early dementia symptoms. Such changes tend to be indistinct and tend to affect short-term memory. For instance, an adult might remember past events that happened several years ago to specific detail, but they can’t remember what they recently had for breakfast in the morning. Furthermore, the patient may forget where they put personal items (i.e., keys, hearing aids, and other personal belongings), scheduled appointments, to take essential medications, and they may even struggle to remember basic tasks (i.e., how to tie their shoes or why they visited a particular room in the house). They may also forget a familiar person who visited them a day before.

2. Problem solving difficulties

Immediate dementia symptoms will often cause a patient to have difficulty in completing and solving very common tasks. For instance, they may find problems completing complex tasks such as balancing their chequebook. Further, when given a new task that is familiar and they’ve completed a number of times, they may show signs of struggle to start or complete (i.e., cooking a meal). Also, new routines in solving the problems become much more difficult for them.

3. Disorientation or confusion about time and place

Dementia can cause a patient to lose track of time, place, seasons, and dates. The individual may begin to struggle to understand the happenings in their surroundings. They might even forget how they reached a particular area when walking, driving, or commuting. This may cause disorientation, frustration, and anger during daily activities and occurrences.

4. Lapses in judgement

The immediate effect of dementia also confuses a person so much that their judgement may be affected negatively. As thinking and memory fade away; the parts of the brain involved in remembering, understanding and processing visual information may also be affected, causing poor judgement when stairs, parking a vehicle or even recognising common objects. Some patients may make continuous mistakes that involve daily tasks they’ve done frequently (i.e., cleaning house, personal grooming, dressing themselves, or preparing meals), which may put them or others at personal risk. This does not mean that all dementia patients lack decision making abilities as it affects some patients and not others.

5. Speech or communication issues

These symptoms involve a patient struggling to explain themselves, forget the right words when expressing their thoughts to others, or have challenges both expressing themselves and understanding others. For example, during a conversation, the patient may have trouble following or joining in on a topic. Or sometimes, they might be talking, but lose their train of thought suddenly. Most commonly, dementia patients may get repeativie during conversations or struggle to name various familiar objects or give them the wrong name.