She re-diagnosed the Hollywood star, Bruce Willis, with frontotemporal dementia, highlighting dementia as one of its rare and dangerous forms, especially since many people do not notice the first signs of the disease.
Almost a year after Bruce Willis’s family, 67, announced that he had retired from acting after it was confirmed that he had aphasia, his family now says that “his condition has deteriorated.”
And last March, Willis’s family said that his loss of the ability to speak affected his cognitive abilities, as the condition causes him to lose the ability to understand or express speech.
In a statement Thursday, his family said the communication challenges were just one symptom of frontotemporal dementia.
The statement also said, “There are no cures for this disease, a fact that we hope will change in the coming years. As Bruce’s condition develops, we hope that any media attention will focus on shedding light on this disease, which needs more awareness and research.”
Frontotemporal dementia is one of the least common forms of dementia, accounting for only 2 percent of diagnoses. Alzheimer’s disease is the most common type of dementia.
What are the most prominent signs of dementia?
The British newspaper “Daily Mail” published a report that monitors the most prominent early signs of a person’s dementia, making it easier for those around him to identify the injury and deal with it correctly.
Among the most prominent of these signs:
Donate or forfeit money
- Distributing money to strangers may be an early warning sign of Alzheimer’s disease.
- According to research conducted by the University of Southern California and Bar-Ilan University in Israel, financial altruism has been linked to the early stages of the disease.
- The findings, published in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease, indicated that those who were at higher risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease were more willing to hand out money to someone they had not met before.
- “Trouble handling money is thought to be one of the early signs of Alzheimer’s, and this finding supports that idea,” said Duke Hahn, a professor of neuropsychology at the University of Southern California who led the research.
Bad driving
- The disease can make people with Alzheimer’s bad at driving, as the condition affects motor skills, memory and thought processes, making them slow and bad at parking.
- Researchers at Washington University in St. Louis studied the driving habits of 139 people over the course of a year, to see how Alzheimer’s disease changes the way they drive.
- Half of the participants were diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s disease, while the other half were not.
Profanity
- Not being able to control what the person says, and uttering insults in inappropriate situations, may be another warning sign.
- A healthy person is usually able to choose his words to prevent himself from using inappropriate language in front of children, for example, but this weakens with disease.
- A study published in Cognitive and Behavioral Neurology in 2010, conducted by researchers from the University of California, found that people with dementia tend to use profanity.
No “filter”
- Just like swearing, as the brains of Alzheimer’s patients change, they are less able to use a “filter” to filter their actions and words, and to understand that some behaviors may be inappropriate.
- According to experts, being naked in public, being rude, and talking to strangers are all signs of the disease.
