Memory Loss or Dementia – When Should We Worry?

How often do you find yourself going upstairs and forgetting why you did? Are you struggling to put names to faces or recall recent events?

We all forget where we put the keys, or come home from a shopping trip only having to then go straight back out to get the one thing we went for in the first place – but when should we see this as inconvenience or irritation and when should we see it as perhaps something more worrying?

It is a concern that most people face on a quite regular basis – our brains peaked in our late twenties and have been declining slowly since then!

Visiting Your GP

Being absent-minded and finding that you can rely less and less upon your memory can be frightening and if you or someone in your family is concerned you should in the first instance make an appointment to have a chat with your GP about it.

There are of course certain signs to watch for – a checklist of things which, if you are experiencing, or perhaps noticing in someone close to you, may be a strong indication that your memory loss is more than a sign of ageing.

Dementia is something that can be hard to diagnose in its early stages, but by chatting to you and people close to you, carrying out observational and physical assessments your GP will be able to determine if your memory loss is stress-related, perhaps caused by a lack of vitamins or is indeed a type of dementia.

Useful Sources of Information

At Our Place we have a number of pages dedicated to Alzheimer’s which you can click here to read There are many useful online sources of information to use as a guide, or as a way of getting some reassurance that what you are experiencing is quite common. We have found the Alzheimers Society website to be an invaluable source of information and you can link to it here: www.alzheimers.org.uk another useful source of information can be found on the Caring.com website: www.caring.com/articles/memory-worries? Which has a good checklist of worrying memory loss indicators.