Almost a quarter of people who have had a stroke will go on to develop dementia after about three to six months.
Often, these strokes can be so small that you do not know you are having them. These are known as silent strokes. Symptoms of vascular dementia can appear suddenly if they are caused by a single stroke, or if they are caused by silent strokes they may appear gradually over time.
The brain damage that occurs with a stroke or a ministroke (transient ischemic attack) may increase your risk of developing dementia.
How Does a Stroke Impact Life Expectancy? Despite the likelihood of making a full recovery, life expectancy after stroke incidents can decrease. Unfortunately, researchers have observed a wide range of life expectancy changes in stroke patients, but the average reduction in lifespan is nine and a half years.
Recent studies showed that the proportion of dementia caused by SVD ranges from 36 to 67% [9, 28, 31, 33]. Further, patients with a first-ever lacunar stroke present with cognitive impairment in more than half of cases and more than 55% of patients fulfill mild cognitive impairment criteria [33].
Up to 60% of stroke survivors may develop cognitive decline within a year. Up to 60% of all stroke survivors develop memory and thinking problems within a year, and one-third go on to develop dementia within five years, according to a new American Stroke Association scientific statement.
Symptoms specific to vascular dementia
Symptoms can sometimes develop suddenly and quickly get worse, but they can also develop gradually over many months or years.
Early signs of vascular dementia can include mild: slowness of thought. difficulty with planning. trouble with understanding.
The Mini-Cog test.
A third test, known as the Mini-Cog, takes 2 to 4 minutes to administer and involves asking patients to recall three words after drawing a picture of a clock. If a patient shows no difficulties recalling the words, it is inferred that he or she does not have dementia.
Introduction: The five-word test (5WT) is a serial verbal memory test with semantic cuing. It is proposed to rapidly evaluate memory of aging people and has previously shown its sensitivity and its specificity in identifying patients with AD.
The life expectancy will vary from person to person and what other conditions you have. On average, people with vascular dementia live for around five years after symptoms begin, less than the average for Alzheimer's disease.
If a person has several smaller strokes over time, multiple infarcts will build up in their brain. They may eventually develop dementia if the combined damage of all these infarcts is enough to cause problems with memory, thinking or reasoning.
Rapidly progressive dementias (RPDs) are dementias that progress quickly, typically over the course of weeks to months, but sometimes up to two to three years. RPDs are rare and often difficult to diagnose.
Cancers, infections, toxins and autoimmune conditions could all cause a fast decline in mental function, as well as the more common neurodegenerative causes of dementia such as Alzheimer's, strokes and Parkinson's disease.
The five-minute cognitive test (FCT) was designed to capture deficits in five domains of cognitive abilities, including episodic memory, language fluency, time orientation, visuospatial function, and executive function.
Cerebral infarction and brain hemorrhage are the most common causes of memory loss.
Can memory loss after stroke be treated? Memory can improve over time, either spontaneously or through rehabilitation, but symptoms can last for years. Your memory loss may benefit from medications for related problems, such as anxiety, depression or sleeping problems.
Sometimes stroke patients get worse once they stop participating in rehabilitation and stop exercising. Research supports that adherence to a rehabilitation plan leads to greater functional outcomes for stroke survivors.
What Is the Outlook for Stroke-Related Dementia? At this time, there is no known cure for vascular dementia. While treatment can stop or slow the worsening of symptoms, or even improve them in some cases, the damage done to the brain by a stroke cannot be reversed.
But some changes will be long term. You are still the same person, but a stroke may change the way you respond to things. It's not always possible to go back to the way you were before a stroke, but you can get help and support to make the best recovery possible for you.