ATLANTA — Worldwide, 55 million people are living with Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias. That number will continue to grow as the population ages.
Dementia has been in the spotlight since former First Lady Rosalynn Carter announced her own diagnosis back in May. In November, two days after announcing she had entered home hospice care, Carter died.
It prompted several questions from viewers about whether dementia is fatal and why.
THE QUESTION
Is dementia fatal?
THE SOURCES
- Emory Brain Health Center
- Dr. James Lah, Vice Chair of Neurology Department
THE ANSWER
Yes, dementia is fatal.
WHAT WE FOUND
To understand why dementia causes someone’s death, Lah said one must first understand what dementia is.
“Dementia is not a disease. Dementia is just a description of symptoms. The reason that I say that it is fatal is because the conditions that cause dementia are generally currently incurable,” he said.
The most common form of dementia is Alzheimer’s disease. The cognitive decline causes loss of memory, reasoning, and basic abilities like driving, managing medications, and calculating finances.
Eventually, the decline affects someone’s ability to bathe, eat and breathe, all things controlled by the brain.
“The ancient parts of the brain and the bottom in the brain stem are responsible for basic activities like maintaining blood pressure, maintaining breathing, how you manipulate food or water in your mouth,” Lah said. “Rarely, people may have sufficient degeneration of their nervous system from these two mental illnesses where it actually extends into these primitive areas of the brain to cause an inability to maintain those very basic functions.”
But, even as the brain deteriorates, Lah said there’s another more common reason the disease becomes deadly.
“In most cases, people don’t die of the brain disease itself,” he said. “Most people with late-stage dementia die from things like respiratory illness. They are more prone to pneumonia or other types of infections. It’s the deterioration of the brain and brain function that causes the individual to not be able to care for themselves physically the way that we normally would and puts them at greater risk of these secondary complications, which ultimately wind up being the cause of death.
So, we can verify that, yes, dementia is fatal – in some cases because the brain fails to perform basic functions, but usually because of secondary causes like infection.