Alzheimer's is like England

People often ask us “what’s the difference between Alzheimer’s and dementia?” I’ve started telling them that Alzheimer’s is rather like England.

England isn’t the United Kingdom. It happens to be a little more than half the UK’s land area and has easily the majority of the population. However, it isn’t the UK and it isn’t even the whole of the island of Great Britain, just most of both. It is strange then that England and the UK are sometimes referred to as if they were synonymous, to the justifiable irritation of the Welsh, Scots and Northern Irish.

The same thing has happened to Alzheimer’s disease (AD for short) and dementia. AD probably accounts for about 60% of cases of dementia, though the picture is blurred a little by mixed dementia and difficulty in achieving an exact diagnosis. It is most cases, but not all cases, of dementia. At some point, don’t ask me when, people started to refer to dementia as Alzheimer’s, as if there were no other kind. This can sometimes be annoying or even distressing to people whose lives have been torn apart by vascular dementia, Lewy body dementia or dementia with another cause.

A charity like BRACE can’t turn an international tide, so we have gone with the flow. When BRACE was named in 1987, the acronym took in the letter A for “Alzheimer’s”, not D for “dementia”. When we revised our strapline in 2009, we made a conscious decision to keep the reference to Alzheimer’s because the term seems to be more widely understood than dementia. The two big national dementia charities in the UK both have the word “Alzheimer’s” in their name and the same pattern seems to be followed in many other parts of the world.

No charity involved in this work can risk not being noticed by using a different language. If we are going to be effective in increasing understanding of dementia, however, we need to make people aware that the causes of dementia are legion and that not every type manifests the same symptoms.

As I am always at pains to point out, BRACE is constituted to fund research into any kind of dementia and currently supports research into four types. These four types or causes of dementia probably account for about 90% of all dementia.