By William K. Mallon in Medium - 30/03/2016
"In this month’s abstracts is a paper titled Frequency of dementia syndromes with a potentially treatable cause in geriatric in-patients: analysis of a 1-year interval, by Marija Djukic et al. European Archives of Psychiatry and Clinical Neurosciences (2015) 265:429–438. No doubt you wait at home with anticipation for this very journal, but I chose this paper because I am always harping on the residents regarding the CBC and the red cell indices when evaluating older patients with altered mental status. This paper added further support and found B12 deficiencies to be the second most common treatable, reversible cause of dementia! It’s a darn vitamin, and the data for the diagnosis was there at admission, and yet they had NOT been treated. This also echoes my experiences. Overall, the authors found a treatable cause of dementia in 18% of those with previously known dementia, and a treatable cause of dementia was found in 31% of the new onset cases!! Amazing, and increasingly important
Dementia is among those ED entities that require more attention, more thinking and more diagnostic acumen, because reversible and treatable causes of dementia are out there."