Dementia and disability
Today, dementia is seen from a medical point of view and it’s treated as a disease. However, this point of view causes an important limitation of rights and social care in the affected person's daily life.
A few years ago, the World Health Organization (WHO) drew attention to the fact that Alzheimer’s disease should be considered a disability.
It is true that Alzheimer’s is a progressive degenerative disease that affects brain cells and it inevitably causes a progressive loss of capacities and, thus, it is a developed disease that gradually progresses.
Dementia is the first cause of disability in people over the age of 64 and, as graphic 13 shows, people over the age of 64 with a disability associated to dementia who have a degree of disability of at least 74% form three quarters of all population with disabilities. As shown in graphic 14.
Graphic 14: People over 65 years of age with dementia by degrees of disability, Galicia 2015.
Nearly three quarters of all people over 64 years old with a disability caused by dementia (70,48%) correspond to people with a degree of disability of at least 74%. Only 12,86% of elderly people with a disability caused by dementia have a degree of disability between 33 and 64%.
