Five years ago, I knew very little about dementia. It was a word I might have prefaced with the outdated word “senile”.
I could no longer put my mother’s forgetting, dropped words and confusion about where she was down to “senior moments”. This was serious, and it was clinical.
Since then, I have written hundreds of thousands of words on dementia in the Post, and in my book A Silent Tsunami: Swimming Against the Tide of My Mother’s Dementia.
I have written about how the disease presents in a person, my experience of caring for my mother, the causes, my quest to find a cure or treatment that might slow it, and the lifestyle modifications we can make to protect our brains.
Despite the increasing prevalence of the condition – according to the World Health Organization, more than 55 million people globally have dementia, and that is expected to almost triple by 2050 – the news is hopeful.