Abstract:
The plasticity of cultural constructs of dementia is shown in two societies: Japan, and an American Indian nation. By demedicalizing the analysis of dementia, the social and cultural factors that influence recognition of symptoms, help-seeking strategies, caregiving behaviors, and adherence to biomedical and sociocultural coping advice become more obvious. Notably in the Japanese example, motivation toward primary prevention behavior is clear in the context of boke since it is an undesirable condition of frailty and cognitive decline considered to be preventable by remaining active. In the American Indian example, the hallucinatory symptoms are positively valued communications with the “other side” rather than pathologically defined. The findings show the need to extend dementia models beyond the biomedical in order to optimize prevention and management of this…
Latest article
Take it from the rats: A junk food diet can cause long-term damage to...
A new USC-led study on rats that feasted on a high-fat, sugary diet raises the possibility that a junk food-filled diet in teens may...
Repurposing non-pharmacological interventions for Alzheimer’s disease through link prediction on biomedical literature
The complete workflow is depicted in Fig. 1. To investigate the association between NPIs and AD, we initially conducted preprocessing and integration of biomedical triples...
Degenerative Dementias and Their Medical Care in the Movies
Compared with other neurologic problems, few films have been dedicated to degenerative dementia. To our knowledge, this is the first systematic review about the...
