Yes, dementia can affect children too

QUESTION: Does dementia affect young people? I have a colleague who suspects her 10-year-old child may be suffering from the condition.

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I do not know why your friend has come to the conclusion that her ten-year-old has this very rare condition but let me confirm that children do suffer from the condition and that the best thing for your friend to do at this stage is to find a doctor to examine the child and offer an opinion on the matter.

In these days of easy access to information, we are seeing more and more people using the psychological mechanism of catastrophising, meaning that one assumes the worst in any situation forgetting the wisdom that tells us common things are more common.

When her husband was the last person to exit from the customs area at an airport, an anxious lady screamed and shouted that she knew in her head that his flight had crashed, that he died and now she was a widow at the age of 35.

Although air accidents do happen, there are more common reasons for delays at airports than accidents, and as had happened in the case of the lady and her husband, he had stopped at the shops at the airport, to buy her and the children some gifts!

Yes, dementia is a possibility but is not the commonest of childhood medical/neurological problems among young people.

That said, and at the risk of losing some readers by the use of uncommon words, dementia in childhood, is often what is called a lysosomal storage disorder.

This simply means that the body is unable to process sugar and cholesterol in the normal way, meaning that these substances accumulate in body cells until the affected brain cells die.

Some of the symptoms your friend might notice, if the child has the condition may be due to this cell death.

Whereas in children the death of the cells is due to the accumulation of these substances inside the cell, in the adult form of a similar condition, Alzheimer’s disease, the accumulation of the responsible proteins is outside the cells of the brain.

It is possible that your friend has noticed some symptoms that she has googled and has led her to conclude that the child has dementia.

Under normal clinical circumstances, the problem is usually the other way round, meaning that doctors often make the diagnosis of the more common conditions such as Autism and it is only later as the condition gets worse that the true diagnosis is made.

Once again, only an expert can make this diagnosis conclusively.

In so doing, he might note the slowed and slurred speech, gradual loss of speech, reduced muscle tone which are all symptoms that can and do occur in other neurological conditions!

As happens in adults, trouble with learning new skills, trouble with memory and loss of the ability to do certain things with their hands for example sew or drive a nail to the wall can be features of the condition.

The course of the condition in both the child and adult forms of the two conditions is highly variable but eventually, in the absence of effective treatment death takes place. Children with dementia do not often live beyond the age of 10 to 15 years.

For the removal of doubt, in both adults and children, there are different causes and therefore types of dementia. In the case of adults for example, it is estimated that 60-80per cent of cases of dementia are of the Alzheimer type while the rest are due to other factors.

In the case of children, what many people call Alzheimer’s dementia, is in reality not, as we have seen above.

Your question has led us in the direction of discussing childhood neurological conditions, has led us to many complicated words and concepts, but the bottom line is amazingly simple.

As in all medical conditions, early diagnosis is the key to good outcomes whether one is dealing with the rare cases of childhood dementia, or the much more common type that is increasingly common in adults over the age of 65 years.

In the case of the child, the pediatrician will help make the diagnosis on time, while in the adult, regular medical checkups together with a healthy lifestyle that includes regular exercise, a balanced diet, and moderation if one opts to use alcohol are highly recommended.