Penn study looks at the emotional impact of a dementia diagnosis

The diagnosis of dementia is increasingly presenting doctors and patients with a psychological problem.

At research centers like the University of Pennsylvania, new diagnostic science means patients can now learn that they have Alzheimer’s disease when the symptoms are mild or that they’re at high risk when they have no symptoms at all.  This will likely be useful someday, when treatments can attack the deadly, memory-robbing disease before it has destroyed so much brain tissue that patients can never recover.  Right now, though, there are no such treatments.  There’s just better access to bad news.

It’s not all that surprising, then, that new research from Penn has found that patients who understood they had mild cognitive impairment or mild Alzheimer’s disease, often a precursor to dementia, were less satisfied with their quality of life than people who were unaware of their diagnoses.