My dad has, I think, mild ASD and has always struggled with basic conversations and been a strong visual thinker.
He lost an eye in an operation to stop an eye cancer four years ago. He instantly lost a big part of his visual processing: it was quite different from the "one eye therefore bumps into lampposts" thing from which he gradually recovered. It's most like he's seeing a negative image or seeing things inside out/the wrong way round. He can still read and walk, but if he tries to show me how to put a screw in the back of a cupboard door, he'll put the screw in the opposite corner to where the knob is. I took him to a carpark to try driving but he was changing the gears wrongly so driving ended there.
He had one scan, after which I spoke to his GP who said "he may have dementia but this scan doesn't show any". However, mum then went on to get a dementia diagnosis which, to be frank, she could have got for him any time in the past ten years, as he finds the kinds of questions he faced impossible.
He has got no worse, other than becoming physically frailer, in four years. If I phone him and mum, he will ask me specific questions about events of the week before in the children's lives.
He may have some visual-led dementia I suppose (like Terry Pratchett?) but surely it would be getting worse? And can he really have Alzheimers if he is getting better at developing workarounds for his visual-processing-induced problems? (eg in a bend in a corridor at my house, he works out a navigation point and a number of steps away from it). The only thing that is getting worse is the physical frailty.
It seems more like stroke or a kind of mind-blindness to me. If he was a child, everyone would, of course, pile in to try to get a proper diagnosis. But at 76, it seems more convenient to just give a "consistent with dementia" diagnosis.
The diagnosis has, on the plus side, opened social, artistic and musical doors that had been closed, and given my mum an identity as a "carer" which has made her somewhat more at peace with life.
But might we be missing out on therapies that could help if we had a more accurate diagnosis?
thanks in advance.