Can ms bring on dementia.

Hi everyone, My dad has altzheimers & he has been put on a new drug called risperidone to control his moods etc. I was reading in the side affects about things & it mentioned how having a stroke can bring on dementia. I asked the carer who is looking after my dad, that I thought a stroke had nothing to do with dementia and he said at the end of the day a stroke is a type of brain injury so yes it can bring on dementia. He doesn’t know about me having ms as a diagnosis so that made me think ok is ms a type of brain injury? Does that mean people with ms are at a higher risk of getting dementia? What do you all think? Has me a little worried now.

The Barts & London blog covered this subject recently.

http://multiple-sclerosis-research.blogspot.co.uk/2013/06/rebranding-ms-as-dementia.html

hi, last year i had a subarachnoid haemorrhage from an aneurism i hadn’t known about, a honking great stroke, basically, because, apparently, ms alone just wasn’t enough to be dealing with . i was recently assessed by a neuro-psychologist who i asked about, pretty much exactly what you want to know. my mother had early onset altzheimers, i have ms, i recently (2012) had my brain injured when they had to drill two holes in the top of my skull to relieve pressure (they don’t seal up the holes after, just sew up the scalp, i realised when i found a great big dent in my skull ) open up my skull to get a metal clip in above my brain stem, bit of an awkward position apparently. he said that he had found no evidence of any dementia and wasn’t aware of any particular link between ms and altzheimers. i could have been asking the wrong questions of the wrong expert and i’m only just coming up to 50. but after not just surviving last year, but definately being classed as having made a good recovery, only 25% do so, 25% are left severely disabled, 25% don’t survive the operation and the remaining 25% don’t survive to have an operation. i’m feeling really different about my ms, i wouldn’t say i was quite…zen?! but the whole thing has left me feeling much more pragmatic. i’m just winging it now, i can’t have an mri to assess either my ms or to look for any damage from altzheimers, so i’ve just got to wait and see… but this sure as hell beats what could have happened

sorry, i rambled rather a lot,

wendy x.

Interesting that the Barts blog was unsigned, so we do not know just who came up with the crazy idea of calling MS a dementia. Might as well call my dropped foot a sign of dementia!

Think about this:
After my Dx was changed to MS, I presented papers at two international conferences, and was still able to lecture at masters level only last year.

MS as a dementia - no way.

Geoff

Hi, I’ve read that Alzheimer’s is now sometimes referred to as Type 3 Diabetes, as it seems to be becomming linked more and more with high-sugar, high-carb diets. Alternative medicine is now promoting a high-fat (good fats like olive oil, coconut oil and avocados), low-carb (no gluten/grains) diet. Not always what we want to hear, especially as the advice flies in the face of everything we’ve been previously told. Heather