노인성 치매

Senile Dementia

Dementia has emerged as a major health challenge, not only for clinicians but for a society as a whole. The explosion of research aimed at exploring dementia in the past 20 years has produced a great deal of knowledge concerning not only Alzheimer's disease but also other conditions referred to non-Alzheimer's diseases. Recently the advance of neuroimaging, neuropsychology, and molecular genetics has offered our best hope to trace the causal chain about Alzheimer's and non-Alzheimer's disease. Our under-standing of the pathogenesis of dementia is improving, and new research will allow more effective preclinical screening of potential therapeutic compounds. The core of treatment of demented patients is psychiatric management, which must be based on a solid alliance with the patient and family and thorough psychiatric, neurological, and general medical evaluations of the nature and cause of the cognitive deficits and associated noncognitive symptoms. Dementia is often progressive and thus, treatment must evolve with time in order to address newly emerging issue. New medications will need to be incorporated with innovative psychoso-cial therapies and health system changes to improve the quality of life of patients and caregivers. Management inv-olves psychosocial and community resources as well. To date, the status of our management of demented patients is on the beginning stage. Ulti-mately, we will need to build a management model on demented patients as long-term coun-terplan.