This text based course is a transcript of the live webinar titled, "Dementia Management: Evaluation and Staging".
>>Kathleen Weissberg: Dementia management is near and dear to my heart for a number of reasons. It has become my specialty probably because I am convinced I have dementia. Kidding aside, it is something that it is kind of fun to specialize in, if you will, because there are so many challenges and every day is new and different as you go in to treat. I am hoping to impart a whole bunch of information to you guys. I want to talk about what we are going to review first.
Course Objectives
In today’s seminar, we are going to talk about the stages of dementia. We are going to talk about standardized evaluations primarily, because that is going to be our first step. We need to make sure we know what stage of the dementia process the patient is in, because that is going to guide all of our treatment interventions. Our job as OTs and COTAs is to evaluate a resident's current cognitive, linguistic, and behavioral function, determine their spared skills, and then provide strategies to decrease negative behaviors, to modify the environment, and help them to perform their tasks.
At the end of today, you should be able to discuss the stages of dementia, related behaviors and abilities, discuss three theoretical frameworks that are used to describe the stages, identify triggers for screening that might indicate a referral to occupational therapy, and finally to identify some standardized assessments. We are going to go through a whole bunch of those.
Definition of Dementia
Let's talk about a definition of dementia. Dementia is defined as a progressive loss of cognitive skills and ability to adapt to ADL affecting at least three of five areas: language, memory, visual spatial skills, emotion and personality, and/or cognition such as higher-level thinking. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) adds in also that it is a general loss of cognitive abilities and some of the things we might see are impairment in memory, aphasia, apraxia, agnosia, disturbed planning, organizational problems, and abstract thinking abilities.
