Death dementia is a kind of living death for all those unfortunate senior citizens who have fallen prey to this illness. While it is not life threatening in the sense heart attacks, strokes and cardiac arrests are, it definitely reduces the mortality rate in old age and the person at the mercy of severe dementia towards its later stage is like a walking talking dead corpse.

• Severe Loss of memory
• Severe Communication problems
• Pitiful loss of mobility
• Problems with eating
• Weight loss
• Incontinence
• Interventions for preventing death dementia

An old patient whose dementia is diagnosed as serious and in the later stages of the illness and if his illness is making it painful for him to live , the physicians who are treating him might consult his family members to discuss issues like whether to let him die in a natural manner or prolong his life through medical intervention.

By medical intervention I mean, putting the patient on saline and drip, antibiotic treatment to cure pneumonia, resuscitation after heart attack etc.

Patients who are suffering from the final stages of dementia do not respond to resuscitation and if they at all do, further brain damage may take place.

With the consent of the near and dear ones of the patient, the physician will take the penultimate decision of whether to continue with treatment in such advanced cases or discontinue it.

You cannot predict the life expectancy in patients like these, for dementia can eat away at the patient for 10 years or longer.

It reduces life span in its heavily advanced stage.

At times it is not dementia but other kinds of diseases like bronchopneumonia that will cause the actual death and which will be mentioned in the death certificate.

A heart attack or a clot in the lung, or other medical conditions or for patients above 70 years of age, ageing can trigger death.

Sometimes other causes which have no relation with dementia can kill the affected person.

Thus death dementia can both be the sole cause and the contributory factor.