Conversations and comprehension

[Geminirisinggoblin]

My family and I have had some recent concerns about my mother and trying to piece together things that might be an indicator of early dementia. She’s mid sixties and I can see that some of things she does could just be dismissed as general aging.

I’ve noticed that over the last year especially she will tell me something about something my brother or sister has going on, then when I speak to them I get a different version of events. An example was a wedding we were all going to at the beginning of the year. Everytime I spoke to her for weeks she explained what my brothers plans were for travel to this wedding. When I spoke to him a week out to try and line up he said they were never going and he’d told her that when the invitations arrived. My sister has recently been living abroad and my mother suggested she might have to come back at short notice, saying she was making plans to flee. Spoke to sister obviously concerned - no such thing is happening, she’s has a holiday somewhere nearby but everything is pretty much business as usual.

I don’t quite know what to make of it. She’s never been the most reliable historian (she likes to put her own spin on the past) but I can’t see why she would just make up random things. Starting to wonder if it’s a comprehension issue - she knows we are all in touch with one another so would clock some of this.

I’ve heard on confabulation but not sure if this is an example of that?

I should say sister lives in the UAE so not a totally mad thing to have said!

Are there other signs? Like does she ask the same questions within a few minutes or have word finding issues? My mum confabulates but that wasn’t an early symptom.

I’ve come across confabulation but I don’t know a lot about it. In the experience we had it was more things like a purse was missing so the confabulation comes up with the excuse that someone must have broken in and stolen it when it’s simply that the Dementia sufferer has moved it and can’t remember doing it or where they’ve moved it to.

Hopefully someone will be along soon who knows more

How's her hearing? She may be making things up because she simply didn't hear the conversation properly.

Things we’ve noticed - not being able to get names right for people, has given the description of something rather than the word itself, very slow walking like she’s worried she might fall over (no other known health issues), seems a bit startled if someone other than us asks her something, for example was with her when she was paying for an item of clothing and they asked if she wanted a bag and she was very taken aback like she didn’t know how to respond. The being reliable in relaying conversations thing also.

My mum got diagnosed with dementia 5 years ago and massively does this. Every time she tells a story, it changes with each retelling. Probably less obvious at the start of her dementia, 5 years in it is very obvious as she'll bring in people in the story who couldn't possibly have been in it, etc. I remember being quite confused about it as a dementia symptom at the time but in the 5 years since, I've asked multiple other people whose relatives also had dementia and a few (but not all) mentioned them doing similar.

She doesn’t repeat things in the space of a few minutes. Have noticed she will start a lot of conversations with, “I can’t remember if I’ve told you about x” and generally she already will have but it will have been not super recently.

i think I would also suspect dementia - with some excellent masking skills. Sorry. It’s shit.

Together with the difficulties with words/names and the change in how she walks, I would also be concerned about dementia and would encourage her to see her GP if you can. I agree with pp though, that it would be a good idea to have a hearing check as that could also explain some of the issues with how to answer questions/misunderstanding what people have said.

When my DM discussed concerns about similar things with her GP she was given lots of tests, including hearing test, to rule out other explanations before moving to a full dementia assessment.
I now realise that my DM had been masking for a long time. She's even said herself that she was trying to cover up what was happening and is relieved now that she has a diagnosis and feels she can tell people when she doesn't understand/doesn't know. Looking back, there were lots of times when she gave an explanation of something that seemed plausible but unusual/odd and then later turned out to be wrong. It was always explained away as me misunderstanding what she'd told me, or things having changed since she told me. Sometimes things she told me turned out to be (with the benefit of hindsight) things she was clearly worried about but had not actually happened- a bit like the idea of your sister having to leave in a hurry.