Browsing by Author "Karhunen, Oona"
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Karhunen, Oona (2019)Goals: Minor cognitive impairment (MCI) is believed to be an intermediate state between regular aging and dementia, especially Alzheimer's disease. MCI have been used to detect older adults who have a high risk of developing dementia. However, it has not proved to be efficient in separating those who will progress to dementia from those who will not. Neuropsychiatric symptoms have been suggested as another mean to achieve better sensitivity. Neuropsychiatric symptoms are more prevalent in older adults with MCI than in those with regular cognitive functioning. Certain neuropsychiatric symptoms together with MCI increase the risk of dementia more than MCI without the neuropsychiatric symptom. Most of the research literature around neuropsychiatric symptoms and the risk of dementia has focused on depression and anxiety symptoms. However, among neuropsychiatric symptoms psychotic symptoms separate older adults with MCI from those with regular cognitive functioning most prominently. In this bachelors thesis I investigate whether psychotic symptoms increase the risk of decline in cognitive functions towards MCI and dementia in older adults. Methods: Literature was searched from an online database PubMed with entries "dementia AND delusions" and "Alzheimer's disease AND delusions". The final material consists of two reviews and five research articles. Results: In the light of research literature, psychotic symptoms increase the risk of dementia in older adults treefold in comparison with older adults with regular cognitive functioning. Different psychotic symptoms have different relations. Visual hallucinations increase the risk of decline in cognitive functioning, whereas both delusions and hallucinations increase the risk of dementia. The risk of dementia increases as the number of psychotic symptoms increases. The psychotic symptoms increase the risk of dementia independently of cognitive functioning. Dementia related psychotic symptoms can appear before cognitive impairment. This backs up the hypothesis that dementia related neuropsychiatric symptoms can arise during dementia prodrome before cognitive deficits arise. Scanning for psychotic symptoms can help detect dementias in their early phases.
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