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My spouse dumped is breakfast in the toilet when I wasn't looking and then showed me the clean plate and said he ate it all. Or, asked another way, can someone who is able to construct a deliberate lie actually have dementia?
CallMeIshmael
Give a Hug
Oct 22, 2011
Why not?
These diseases are not clean cut, like macular degeneration, for example. In cases where autopsies are performed, we find that half of the Alzheimer's diagnoses were incorrect. Even the stages of these kinds of diseases are gray areas that might be arbitrarily reclassified at any moment.
It would be an odd observation of the human condition though, if the end stage of a degenerative brain disease included the condition, "No longer able to construct a deliberate lie".
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MaxxsGranny
obviously, they do... You saw the clean plate didn't you... They are not Dumb, in fact they generaly have long term memories, and thats something he might have done as a child and remembers it foundly..I had to smile when I read your qestion although I know you must be very frustrated by it, try to invision that 9 year old feeding his vegtables to the dog, under the table and smile....
jeannegibbs
It sounds like your spouse wants very much to please you. He thought a clean plate would make you happy. He thought of a way to make that happen, as MaxxsGranny suggests, perhaps from his childhood.
It is also possible that by the time he showed you the clean plate he had already forgotten dumping it and he really believed he had eaten it.
Lewy Body Dementia (which my husand has) is known for its fluctuations in cognitive ability. Sometimes he seems normal and an hour later he is definitely not normal. Some caregivers think at first that the patient must be faking it -- nope, that is the nature of the disease. While the fluctuations are very pronounced in LBD, they occur in other dementias as well.
Ishmael's observation that a large percentage of dementia diagnoses prove to be wrong on autopsy is correct -- but it is not a matter of the patients not having dementia, it is a matter of what kind of dementia they have. There is a strong (one might say desperate) push in the research arena to find biomarkers that could be used for diagnositic purposes. It would be great to have a blood test to be able to say this person has dementia, types A and B.
Until then, we spouses of dementia victims have to go with our observations and with the best guesses of experts.
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Aldonza3
Thank you. All answers received were helpful. And it is comforting to hear responses from you.
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