Dementia

Dementia is not a single disease. It is an umbrella term for an acquired, persistent decline in two or more cognitive domains — memory, language, executive function, visuospatial ability, attention or social cognition — that is severe enough to interfere with a person's independence in everyday life. That last clause is what separates dementia from ordinary forgetfulness and from milder syndromes: the deciding factor is functional impact, not test scores alone. More than a hundred distinct diseases can produce this syndrome, which is why two people carrying the same diagnosis can present in strikingly different ways.

The Dementia track at the Neurology Conference is deliberately organised around the syndrome rather than around any one causative disease. Where our Alzheimers Disease sessions dive into amyloid and tau biology, and our Cognitive Decline sessions address the pre-dementia spectrum and prevention, this track concentrates on the questions that only arise at the syndrome level: how clinicians distinguish one subtype from another at the bedside, how mixed pathology complicates that picture, how the illness is staged and managed across a decade or more, and how health systems organise care around a condition with no cure.

Sessions are built for practising neurologists, geriatricians, old-age psychiatrists, neuropsychologists, nurses, allied health professionals, health-service researchers and policy specialists. Because the dementias sit at the intersection of pathology and ageing biology, the programme also connects closely with work presented under Neurobiology of Aging and Aging and Neurodegeneration. Delegates should expect a mix of clinical case discussion, diagnostic reasoning, service-design evidence and ethics — not a single-mechanism research symposium.

Dementia, Mild Cognitive Impairment and Normal Ageing: Drawing the Lines

A large share of diagnostic error in this field comes from misplacing a patient on a spectrum rather than from missing a disease outright. The track opens by making those boundaries explicit.

• Subjective cognitive decline — the person notices a change; objective testing is normal. Risk is modestly elevated but most will not progress.
• Mild cognitive impairment — objective deficit on testing, but instrumental activities of daily living remain broadly intact. Annual conversion to dementia varies widely by cohort and referral setting.
• Dementia (major neurocognitive disorder) — objective deficit plus meaningful loss of independence in daily activities.
• Terminology in transition — why DSM-5 replaced "dementia" with "major neurocognitive disorder", what that reframing gained in precision, and why the older word persists in clinics, policy documents and patient advocacy.
• Cognitive reserve — how education, occupational complexity and bilingualism can mask pathology, delaying presentation until the underlying disease is advanced.