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The baby boomers are getting older, and will stay older for longer. And they will run right into the dementia firing range. How will a society cope? Especially a society that can't so readily rely on those stable family relationships that traditionally provided the backbone of care?
The science supporting the relationship between carbohydrates and dementia is quite exciting, as it paves the way for lifestyle changes that can profoundly affect a person's chances of remaining intact, at least from a brain perspective.
My dementia hasn't just affected me - it's affected my friends and family, too.
My husband is leaving me. No dramas, no slammed doors - well, OK, a few slammed doors - and no suitcase in the hall, but there is another woman involved. Her name is Dementia.
I've never minded solitude. For a writer, it's a natural condition. But caring for a dementia sufferer leads to a peculiar kind of loneliness.
When you deal with a person who's experiencing dementia, you can see where they're struggling with knowledge. You can see what they forget completely, what they forget but they know what they once knew. You can tell how they're trying to remember.
Those with dementia are still people and they still have stories and they still have character and they're all individuals and they're all unique. And they just need to be interacted with on a human level.
With something like cancer, there is a feeling that you can fight it in some way or control your response to it, but with dementia there is the fear of losing control of your mind and your life.
We can alleviate physical pain, but mental pain - grief, despair, depression, dementia - is less accessible to treatment. It's connected to who we are - our personality, our character, our soul, if you like.
That's the thing with dementia. If you're with somebody who has a serious illness, you can usually talk to them, have a laugh every now and then - the person is still with you. With dementia, there's no conversation; there's no togetherness, no sharing.
