Dementia affects thousands of Virginians and their families. Although the risk of dementia increases as one gets older, it can affect younger people as well.
Alzheimer’s is the most common medical condition that causes dementia, but there are many other underlying neurological issues that can trigger the condition.
As many people in Richmond may have experienced with their loved ones, dementia causes a progressive decline in the patient’s ability to think, to remember and even to do basic physical and mental tasks.
There are some early warning signs that a loved one has dementia and should seek treatment:
- Memory loss with respect to basic information and information the person used to know
- Forgetting how to do tasks a person used to do with ease
- Frequent confusion about the time of day or where one is
- Emotional and social problems
- Difficulty with spatial relationships that might lead one to think the person has vision problems
- Not simply misplacing objects but misplacing them and not being able to recall where they put them or how the objects got there.
The natural aging process also changes how a person’s brain works, so the key question with respect to any of these warning signs is whether the person is consistently and progressively worse over time. For example, is the person no longer able to do tasks they used to do?
Occasional mental lapses that a person eventually self-corrects are part of the aging process. By contrast, dementia eventually will seriously interfere with a person’s daily life.
What does dementia have to do with estate planning?
A person in the later stages of dementia may not legally be able to create or update a valid estate plan. Early on in the condition, though, a patient can, and should, try to continue to do some tasks independently.
Among other things, they should consider creating the necessary documents so that trusted loved ones can help them both with their medical care and their finances. They also should make sure that their property will be divided according to their wishes after they die.