Dementia warning sign that can appear before sufferers experience memory loss

An early warning sign of dementia before sufferers start to lose their memory has been identified.

According to an American neurologist, a possible early symptom of dementia can appear in people’s vision before they experience the memory loss most commonly linked to Alzheimer’s disease, Gloucestershire Live reports. Health researchers working with the University of California in San Francisco have found that the very first signs of dementia could be signalled by ophthalmologists if they know to look for posterior cortical atrophy or PCA, also known to doctors as Benson’s syndrome.

The condition is sometimes thought of as a visual variant of Alzheimer’s, affecting areas in the brain responsible for spelling, calculation, spatial perception and complex visual processing. Dr Marianne Chapleau, a neurologist from the University of California in San Francisco, believes that diagnosing PCA quicker and more often could benefit many more patients who are in the first stages of developing Alzheimer’s disease.

She said: “Most patients see their optometrist when they start experiencing visual symptoms and may be referred to an ophthalmologist who may also fail to recognise PCA. We need better tools in clinical settings to identify these patients early on and get them treatment.”

For the early diagnosis of dementia, the signs of PCA start to appear before the age of 60, on average. This is usually before the first signs of memory loss and confusion become visible in those developing Alzheimer’s, reports The Express. Read Dr Chapleau’s full research paper in The Lancet.

It states that people with PCA first see a doctor 3.8 years after symptoms appear, on average, Unfortunately, Dr Chapleau and her colleagues say that by this time, mild or moderate symptoms of dementia can be seen.

When diagnosed, many sufferers of PCA showed signs of “constructional dyspraxia, space perception deficit, and simultanagnosia.” Constructional dyspraxia is when patients are unable to copy a drawing or build a simple.

Space perception deficit is when a sufferer has issues with identifying the location of something they see, hear or feel. Simultanagnosia is a visual disorder that refers to when a patient has difficulty paying attention to more than one object at a time.