Page 3 - Dementia Awareness

Dementia Awareness

Session 1 Overview of Dementia

Who we are.
This material has been collated, prepared and presented by people living with Dementia. As such it is one of,
if not the first such presentation.

Our group the Southern Dementia Advisory Group formed as part of the Dementia Friendly Kiama project in
2014. We are comprised of people living with Dementia and their immediate carers and have morphed well
beyond our initial roll of informing and advising the project. The DAGs as we affectingly refer to ourselves
was only the seventh such advisory group in the world, but the first that was formed at a community level
rather than at a “national” level. As such we were acknowledged by the World Health Organisation, and the
Dementia Alliance International.

We have gone on to not only inform and guide the Kiama Project (which is being acknowledged as the “Gold
Standard” in developing Dementia Friendly communities world-wide) but to inform Dementia Australia’s
Dementia Friendly program, as well as advise other national programs such as what is being developed in
Singapore today.

What is Dementia?
Dementia is an umbrella term used to describe a group of over 100 medical conditions that have a significant
impact on cognitive ability and our ability to do normal tasks. Alzheimer’s disease is the most common of
these conditions. Some of these conditions include;

 Alzheimer’s Disease
o Sporadic Alzheimer’s Disease
o Familial Alzheimer’s Disease
 Vascular Dementia
o Multi-infarct dementia
o Binswanger's disease
 Lewy Body disease
 Parkinson’s disease dementia
 FrontoTemporal Dementia
o Behavioural-variant FrontoTemporal dementia
o Semantic FrontoTemporal Dementia
o Progressive non-fluent aphasia
o Inherited FrontoTemporal Dementia
o Frontotemporal dementia with Parkinsonism-17 (FTDP-17)
 Alcohol related Dementia
o Wernicke’s encephalopathy
o Korsakoff’s syndrome
 Down Syndrome and Alzheimer’s disease
 HIV associated dementia
 Younger-onset dementia
 Dementia caused by Huntington’s disease
 Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease
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