Differentiating dementias in long-term care patients.

Many long-term care residents are diagnosed with dementia, but dementia appears in many forms. Alzheimer's disease, the most common, is typified by a slow onset and relentless progression to complete incapacitation. Vascular dementia usually appears somewhat abruptly, is associated with vascular comorbidities, and has an unpredictable progression pattern. Lewy body dementia shares features of both Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease; its hallmarks include fluctuating cognitive performance, visual hallucinations, and extrapyramidal motor symptoms. Frontotemporal dementias are associated less with memory disorders and more with behavioral and language aberrations. Mixed dementia covers those patients who do not have an apparent singular cause of dementia. Pseudodementia is a dementia resulting from underlying causes and is reversible, unlike the aforementioned dementias.