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The difficulties of the delayed diagnosis for dementia in primary care

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If a surgery appointment is booked for someone over 65, a ‘participating GP’,  might be incentivised to ask about memory problems in a patient at risk of dementia due to heart disease, stroke or diabetes.

There is a concern that some people are missing out on a timely diagnosis of dementia.

It is claimed that some people go undiagnosed for around ten years even, and a large proportion of persons with dementia have never received a formal diagnosis of a dementia.

A further worry is that certain people with much lesser degrees of memory impairment will be plugged into the dementia care pathways, according to Dr John Cosgrove.

At worst, this policy, where individuals are said to be ‘ambushed’ in the video above, may put people from going to see their GPs about other problems.

The risk factors, heart disease, stroke or diabetes, are not known to be risk factors for many types of dementia, although they are certainly treatable risk factors for the ‘vascular dementias’.

There is a concern about what then happens to those people who then receive a possible diagnosis of dementia.

It is known that many of these individuals do not actually want further investigations. In fact, for some, they will not even turn out to have a dementia at all.

A probable diagnosis of dementia is certainly ‘life changing’, and it can mean that a person has access to support services.

But a full work-up of a dementia, ideally, needs more than a quick chat over memory problems.

In one type of dementia, frontal dementia, common in the younger age group (that is, below the age of sixty), memory problems are not even prominent. This type of dementia is characterised by an insidious change in behaviour and personality, often noticed first by those closest to the person with that type of dementia.

And dementia is not the cause of all memory problems: depression in the older age group is an important cause of memory problems.

It is not entirely clear what the medical model offers for dementia; many of the drugs for memory have modest effect if that in Alzheimer’s disease, the commonest form of dementia worldwide.

In fact, Prof Sube Banerjee last week in the Brighton and Sussex Medical School as the new Chair of Dementia there voiced concerns about the relative ineffectiveness that antidepressants can have in dementia; this comes on top of previous concerns that antipsychotics may be relatively contraindicated in some patients particularly, and might even lower the objective quality of life of an individual with dementia.

It’s impossible also to ignore the effects that a diagnosis of dementia might potentially have on the ability of a person to drive a motor vehicle.

And a diagnosis of dementia might put pressure on well informed people concerning financial considerations through ‘lasting power of attorney’.

One wonders how the drive for diagnosis in primary care can enable a balanced discussion of all these powerful issues, against the background of this government policy to improve diagnosis rates of dementia.

At the tail end of Cathy Jones‘ excellent Channel 5 report, the lack of adequate funding of social care is raised.

Further details of Dr Cosgrove’s concerns are described clearly in this blogpost.

This policy as it stands could do much more damage than good,with many unintended consequences arising from false diagnoses.

But there are pressures at play which might give this policy a sustainable momentum for the timebeing.


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