What's the difference between Alzheimer's disease and dementia?

0:03 hey there care Blazer Nation welcome to the place where we talk about everything dementia in today's video I'm going to answer the question that I am most frequently asked and that is what's the difference between dementia and Alzheimer's disease so to start dementia is not a specific disease it's a word that's used to describe a bunch of different thinking problems that older adults can sometimes have for instance memory problems problems with attention uh difficulty with planning organization uh difficulty with finding their words dementia is basically just a word that describes a bunch of different memory problems that older adults can have and it's to the point that these problems are really affecting their day-to-day life it's making their

0:48 day-to-day lives difficult um there are specific types of dementia for instance Alzheimer's disease that's the one we hear about the most because it's the most researched and it's the most common but there are a bunch of other different types of dementia out there for instance uh Louis body dementia vascular dementia dementia due to Parkinson's disease alcohol rated dementia and so forth um so dementia is used as a word to just describe a bunch of thinking problems that can sometimes happen to older adults um so one way to try to keep all these different words um or the difference in mind would be to think about dementia the way people think about cancer for instance um when somebody tells you they have cancer it tells you that they're sick

1:33 but it doesn't exactly tell you what specific type of sick uh for instance it could be lung cancer skin cancer breast cancer the same is true for dementia if somebody tells you they have dementia it tells you they're having problems with their thinking but it doesn't exactly tell you uh the specific type of problem the specific cause of their problems it could be Alzheimer's disease vascular dementia alcohol rated dementia and so forth um to break it down just one step further uh if somebody has lung cancer obviously that means they have cancer but not everybody with cancer has lung cancer the same is true for dementia if somebody has Alzheimer's disease that tells you they have dementia but not everybody with dementia has Alzheimer's

2:19 disease it could be Louis body dementia and so forth um the main thing to keep in mind no matter what word somebody is using to describe their thinking problems whether they're saying the word dementia or they're saying the word Louis bodies or vascular dementia the key point is that it's really difficult uh for the person who has the disease and it's really difficult for their loved ones who are caring for the person with the disease so I hope that this video has been helpful to you um please feel free to comment or leave a question below and uh I will read each and every one of them thank you