Many New Yorkers will have to go through the trial of watching a loved one progress through the stages of dementia. Many others will experience Alzheimer’s Disease or other types of dementia themselves.
Dementia is a progressive disease, meaning that early on, people with dementia may be able to continue with their daily lives. Their loved ones may not even notice that there is a problem.
As time goes on, however, a patient will lose their ability to perform even very basic functions as their ability to remember and process information declines.
Here are some of the early warning signs of dementia:
- It becomes harder for a person to do tasks they used to do easily.
- A person consistently is forgetting basic information they used to know.
- A person starts to struggle with spatial awareness or awareness of the time.
- A person may struggle to come up with the right word for common objects.
- A person may not be able to plan or manage multi-step tasks like following a schedule.
- A person develops social or emotional problems that are out of character.
Many early warning signs of dementia can be confused with the normal aging process or even with a person’s typical behavior. When evaluating warning signs, key questions to ask can include,
- Is the behavior interfering with a person’s ability to manage their lives?
- Is the behavior getting progressively more frequent or more severe?
- Is the behavior new or out of the ordinary for the person?
From an estate planning perspective, early recognition of dementia is important
Early recognition and diagnosis of dementia is important for many reasons. Proper care and treatment early on can slow down the progress of dementia and improve the patient’s quality of life.
From a legal estate planning perspective, a New Yorker in the early stages of dementia may still be able to prepare an estate plan both to provide for their medical and financial needs as their condition progresses and to make sure their property gets passed to their loved ones after their deaths.