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This book brings together international, linguistic research with a focus on interaction in multilingual encounters involving people with dementia in care and healthcare settings. The methodologies used (Conversation Analysis, Ethnography and Discursive Constructionism) capture practices on the micro-level, revealing how very subtle details may be of critical importance for the everyday well-being of participants with dementia, particularly in settings and contexts where there is a lack of a common verbal language of interlocutors, or where language abilities have been lost as a result of dementia. Chapters analyse the practices and actions employed by interlocutors to facilitate mutual understanding, enhance high-quality social relations and assure optimal care and treatment, in spite of language and cognitive difficulties, with an emphasis put on the participants'remaining capacities, and what can be achieved between people with dementia and their interlocutors in a collaborative fashion. This book goes beyond the study of two-party communication to address multiparty and group interactions which are common in residential care and other healthcare settings and will be of interest to professionals and policy makers as well as to medical sciences and linguistics researchers and students.

How are individual and social ideas of late-onset dementia shaped and negotiated in film, literature, the arts, and the media? And how can the symbolic forms provided by popular culture be adopted and transformed by those affected in order to express their own perspectives? This international and interdisciplinary volume summarizes central current research trends and opens new theoretical and empirical perspectives on dementia in popular culture. It includes contributions by internationally renowned scholars from the humanities, social and cultural gerontology, age(ing) studies, cultural studies, philosophy, and bioethics. Contributions by Lucy Burke, Marlene Goldman, Annette Leibing and others.

Written by internationally recognized experts, this text provides students and practicing professionals with cutting-edge information on the diagnosis and treatment of cognitive-communication disorders associated with minimal cognitive impairment (MCI) and dementia-related diseases.

A diagnosis of dementia can be frightening for those affected by the syndrome, their family members, and caretakers. Alzheimer's disease (AD) is the most common form of dementia in those over the age of 65. As many as 5 million Americans age 65 and older may have AD, and that number is expected to double for every 5-year interval beyond age 65. But Alzheimer's is only one of many dementia disorders; another 1.8 million people in the U.S. have some other form of dementia. Among all people with dementia, many are believed to have a mixed type of dementia that can involve more than one of the disorders. This book provides a general overview of various types of dementia, describes how the disorders are diagnosed and treated, and offers highlights of research that is supported by the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke and the National Institute on Aging, both a part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

Dementia: Comprehensive Principles and Practice is a clinically-oriented book designed for clinicians, scientists, and other health professionals involved in the diagnosis, management, and investigation of disease states causing dementia. A'who's who'of internationally-recognized experts contribute chapters emphasizing a multidisciplinary approach to understanding dementia. The organization of the book takes an integrative approach by providing three major sections that (1) establish the neuroanatomical and cognitive framework underlying disorders of cognition, (2) provide fundamental as well as cutting-edge material covering specific diseases associated with dementia, and (3) discuss approaches to the diagnosis and treatment of dementing illnesses.

The healthy human brain contains tens of billions of neurons, specialized cells that process and transmit information via electrical and chemical signals. While the brain may shrink to some degree in healthy aging, it does not lose neurons in large numbers. In Alzheimer's disease, however, damage is widespread as many neurons stop functioning, lose connections with other neurons, and die. Alzheimer's disrupts processes vital to neurons and their networks, including communication, metabolism, and repair. At first, the disease typically destroys neurons and their connections in parts of the brain involved in memory, including the entorhinal cortex and the hippocampus. It later affects areas in the cerebral cortex responsible for language, reasoning, and social behavior. Eventually, many other areas of the brain are damaged, and a person with Alzheimer's becomes helpless and unresponsive to the outside world. This book provides an international approach to dealing with Alzheimer's disease and dementia, as well as discusses the effect this disease has on the brain and its function.

Alison Wray notes that “Alzheimer's Disease affects language in many different ways. Directly, language processing is undermined by damage to the language areas of the brain. Indirectly, language is compromised by short term memory loss, distortions in perception, and disturbed semantic representation... All of this makes AD an obvious focus of interest for linguists and in particular, those interested in the field of pragmatics – yet a striking amount of what is published about AD language is written by non-linguists. AD language is independently researched in at least psychology, neuroscience, sociology, clinical linguistics and nursing. Each discipline has its own methods, theories, assumptions and values, which affect the research questions asked, the empirical approach taken in answering them, and how the evidence is interpreted. Without a more reliable holistic picture informed by linguistic and applied linguistic theory and methods, approaches to diagnosis and care risk being constrained, and may result in a less than satisfactory experience for all those whose daily life involves the direct or indirect experience of AD.”This book is an attempt to address some of the above issues noted by bringing together a group of researchers whose work focuses on interaction in the context of dementia. The authors represent the fields of linguistics, clinical linguistics, nursing, and speech pathology, and each chapter draws on methods associated with discourse analysis and pragmatics to examine how people with dementia utilize language in the presence of cognitive decline. In addition, the book seeks to generate academic discussion on how researchers can move forward to focus greater attention on this topic. In particular, this collection will inspire researchers involved in mainstream theoretical linguistics and pragmatics to turn their attention to the discourse of dementia and investigate what it has to say about our knowledge of language theories, and, in addition, to challenge what we know about ourselves as subjective beings.

In Deutschland sind derzeit 1 Million Menschen von einer Demenz betroffen. Aufgrund der demografischen Entwicklung ist abzusehen, dass diese Zahl ansteigen wird. Eine nicht zu unterschätzende Aufgabe der Zukunft wird es sein, eine menschenwürdige und qualitativ hochwertige, dem aktuellen medizinischen Kenntnisstand entsprechende, ökonomische Begleitung von Menschen mit Demenz zu gewährleisten. Demenz ist bislang eine unheilbare hirnorganische Erkrankung, Hauptrisikofaktor zu erkranken, ist das hohe Alter. Ich werde in der vorliegenden Studie ausführlich auf das Krankheitsbild der Demenz eingehen. Die individuelle Lebensqualität (LQ) des Betroffenen als Zielvariable, bzw. Outcomekriterium, für die Qualität in der Betreuung von an Demenz erkrankten Menschen, steht dann im Mittelpunkt dieses Buches. In dem vorliegenden Buch beschäftige ich mich weiterhin mit den Verfahren zur Bewertung der LQ bei Menschen mit Demenz, die bereits entwickelt wurden und noch in der Entwicklung sind. Ziel des Buches wird es sein, die Problematik der Ergebnismessung im Demenzbereich aufzuzeigen. Ausgehend von der sehr geringen Anzahl deutschsprachiger Publikationen zum Thema, ist es ein zentrales Anliegen dieses Buches, bereits entwickelte Verfahren zur Bewertung der LQ von Menschen mit Demenz vorzustellen, zusätzlich werde ich auf das'Projekt Hilde'eingehen, welches sich noch in der Forschungsphase befindet. Folgende konkrete Fragestellungen stehen in diesem Buch im Vordergrund: Was sind Demenzen? Auf welchen Konzepten bzw. Modellen zur LQ basiert die Forschung im Allgemeinen und bei Demenz im Speziellen? Welche Möglichkeiten zur Bewertung demenzspezifischer LQ gibt es bislang, und wie sehen konkrete Instrumente aus? Welche besonderen Anforderungen stellt das Krankheitsbild Demenz an die Methodik beim Assessment demenzspezifischer LQ? Welche Konzepte für die Betreuung, für an Demenz Erkrankte, werden in der Praxis angewendet? Welches Konzept und Technik steckt hinter der Validation nach Feil, für an Demenz Erkrankte die mangelhaft oder unglücklich orientiert sind?