Mental Health News

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

In mental health news, Researchers looking through 30 years worth of doctor’s files on patients before and after they were diagnosed with dementia have noted that women seemed to be about 12 pounds lighter on average when finally diagnosed with dementia, than women of the same age who did not develop the condition.  This tendency towards losing weight even shows up years before dementia is developed enough to diagnose, as many as 20 years before the diagnosis.  Gradual weight loss could be one of the many early warning signs of dementia.

It is possible that this weight loss is caused by the apathy and loss of smell that can develop in the earliest stages of dementia.  Naturally if you can’t smell your food, you lose a lot of the taste of it and are less inclined to eat.  The apathy can cause people to feel disinclined to even make a meal, especially when living alone.  As far as mental health news goes this could be an important warning sign for doctors to take note of.

Men didn’t seem to have the same correlation in weight loss when diagnosed with dementia.  The researchers theorized that this is because older men are more likely to have a spouse, family member or mental health worker that will cook meals for them and remind them to eat.  Giving this indicator a sad social connotation that elderly women aren’t as likely to receive the same attention from their loved ones.

This piece of mental health news does contradict previous studies that indicated obesity was a risk factor for dementia because diabetes, hypertension and heart disease are also risk factors for dementia and can be caused by obesity.

If I may put in my two cents, maybe its possible that obesity is a risk factor but weight loss is a warning sign that dementia has already started to develop.  When an obese person begins to lose weight because of dementia it may not be as noticeable as in someone of normal weight or who is only slightly overweight?