Many elderly people and their caregivers don’t know a doctor has diagnosed them with dementia.
More than three-quarters of patients with dementia were not aware of their diagnosis, according to results recently published in the Journal of General Internal Medicine.
It’s not because the people didn’t have access to care, researchers said. Fewer than 7% of people in the study lacked a primary care doctor.
Instead, the complex nature of patient-physician relationships might be the reason for this awareness gap, researchers said.
“The physician may not be diagnosing the patient or may be withholding the diagnosis of dementia,” lead researcher Josh Martins-Caulfield, a medical student at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, said in a news release.
“In practice, physicians often hesitate to diagnose dementia, citing reasons such as insufficient time with individual patients to conduct the screening process or not having dementia-specific training,” he continued.
“The discomfort of providing the diagnosis may also lead them to wait for patients or family members to raise concerns about memory issues rather than initiating discussions proactively,” Martins-Caulfield added.
For the study, researchers asked more than 300 people or their caregiver if they’d ever been diagnosed with dementia or Alzheimer’s disease, or if a doctor had ever told them that they had dementia.
The patients, average age 76, were all taking part in a study of brain health in Nueces County, Texas, and had completed a standard cognitive test to see if they had symptoms associated with dementia.
However, about 81% of people with diagnosable dementia were unaware that they had the condition, results show.
The number was even higher among Mexican-Americans, with 85% unaware of their dementia compared with 68% of white people.
These results jibe with other studies showing that Hispanic adults are more likely to have undiagnosed dementia, researchers said.
Timely diagnosis of dementia is crucial, to make sure that both patients and their caregivers receive adequate treatment and support, researchers said.
“Dementia diagnosis unawareness is a public health issue that must be addressed,” senior researcher Dr. Lewis Morgenstern, a professor of neurology, neurosurgery and emergency medicine at the University of Michigan Medical School, said in a news release.
“The diagnosis of dementia provides the opportunity to seek out treatment and home care services to help both patients and caregivers,” Morgenstern concluded. “If the diagnosis is not given, or the understanding of the diagnosis is unclear, it is a missed opportunity.”