4th International Conference on Vascular Dementia June 30 - July 02, 2016 Valencia, Spain

Admiral Nurses are specialist dementia nurses who give much-needed practical and emotional support to family carers, as well as the person with dementia.

To offer support to families throughout their experience of dementia that is tailored to their individual needs and challenges.

To provide families with the knowledge to understand the condition and its effects, the skills and tools to improve communication, and provide emotional and psychological support to help family carers carry on caring for their family member.

Vascular dementia is the second most common type of dementia (after Alzheimer's disease), affecting around 150,000 people in the UK.

The word dementia describes a set of symptoms that can include memory loss and difficulties with thinking, problem-solving or language. In vascular dementia, these symptoms occur when the brain is damaged because of problems with the supply of blood to the brain. 

Rapidly progressive dementias (RPDs) are neurological conditions that develop subacutely over weeks to months, or rarely acutely over days. In contrast to most dementing conditions that take years to progress to death, RPD can be quickly fatal. It is critical to evaluate the RPD patient without delay, usually in a hospital setting, as they may have a treatable condition. 

Severe Demnetia is the fifth stage of dementia is the most severe. At this point your loved one cannot function at all without help. They have experienced extreme memory loss. Additionally, they have no understanding of orientation in time or geography.

It is almost impossible to go out and engage in everyday activities, even with assistance. Function in the home is completely gone and help is required for attending to personal needs.

Semantic dementia, which has also been called "temporal variant FTD," accounts for 20% of FTD cases. Language difficulty, the predominant complaint of people with SD, is due to the disease damaging the left temporal lobe, an area critical for assigning meaning to words. The language deficit is not in producing speech but is a loss of the meaning, or semantics, of words.

Semantic Dementia is one of the three canonical clinical syndromes associated with front temporal lobar degeneration.

National Plan to Address Alzheimer’s Disease, a national effort to expand research in Alzheimer’s and related dementias prevention and treatment and to move the most promising drugs from discovery into clinical trials.

The Plan aims to prevent and effectively treat Alzheimer’s and related dementias by 2025. Its foundation is the 2011 National Alzheimer’s Project Act (NAPA), which was developed to create and maintain a national strategy to overcome the disease.

Mild cognitive impairment (MCI) is a term used to describe a condition involving problems with cognitive function (their mental abilities such as thinking, knowing and remembering).

People with MCI often have difficulties with day-to-day memory, but such problems are not bad enough to be defined as dementia.

The mainstay of management of vascular dementia is the prevention of new strokes. This includes administering antiplatelet drugs and controlling major vascular risk factors.

Neuroprotective drugs such as nimodipine, propentofylline, and posatirelin are currently under study and may be useful for vascular dementia.

Dementia with Lewy bodies (DLB), also known under a variety of other names including Lewy body dementia (LBD), diffuse Lewy body disease, cortical Lewy body disease, and senile dementia of Lewy type, is a type of dementia closely associated with Parkinson's disease.

It is characterized anatomically by the presence of Lewy bodies, clumps of alpha-synuclein and ubiquitin protein in neurons, detectable in post mortem brain histology. Lewy body dementia affects 1.3 million individuals in the United States alone.

Frontotemporal dementia (frontotemporal lobar degeneration) is an umbrella term for a diverse group of uncommon disorders that primarily affect the frontal and temporal lobes of the brain — the areas generally associated with personality, behavior and language.

In frontotemporal dementia, portions of these lobes atrophy or shrink. Signs and symptoms vary, depending upon the portion of the brain affected. Some people with frontotemporal dementia undergo dramatic changes in their personality and become socially inappropriate, impulsive or emotionally indifferent, while others lose the ability to use language.

Frontotemporal dementia (frontotemporal lobar degeneration) is an umbrella term for a diverse group of uncommon disorders that primarily affect the frontal and temporal lobes of the brain, the areas generally associated with personality, behavior and language.

In frontotemporal dementia, portions of these lobes atrophy or shrink. Signs and symptoms vary, depending upon the portion of the brain affected. 

Diagnosing dementia is often difficult, particularly in the early stages. The GP is the first person to consult. The GP may then refer the person being diagnosed to a specialist such as a consultant.

Assessments can include conversations with the person being diagnosed and those close to them, a physical examination, memory tests and/or brain scans.

The Mini Mental State Examination (MMSE) is the most commonly used test for complaints of memory problems or when a diagnosis of dementia is being considered.

Progressive dementia, which is dementia that gets worse with time, is the most common type. Five stages of progressive dementia have been outlined. They are part of the Clinical Dementia Rating (CDR), which professionals use to evaluate the progression of symptoms in patients with dementia.

The five stages describe a patient’s ability to perform in six different areas of cognition and functioning: orientation, memory, judgment, home and hobbies, personal care, and community.

Vascular disease is mainly caused by hardening of the arteries (atherosclerosis) due to a thickening of the artery lining from fatty deposits or plaques (atheroma).

Vascular disease may manifest acutely when thrombi, emboli, or acute trauma compromises perfusion. Thrombosis are often of an athermanous nature and occur in the lower extremities more frequently than in the upper extremities. Multiple factors predispose patients for thrombosis. These factors include sepsis, hypotension, low cardiac output, aneurysms, aortic dissection, bypass grafts, and underlying atherosclerotic narrowing of the arterial lumen.

Dementia is a group of symptoms that can occur as a result of some diseases that damage the brain (examples of such diseases: Alzheimer’s Disease, strokes, Fronto-Temporal Dementia, Lewy Body Dementia, etc).

The abilities of persons with dementia decline in many ways. This affects them and everyone around them–family members, friends, colleagues, etc.

Dementia is the loss of cognitive functioning, which means the loss of the ability to think, remember, or reason, as well as behavioural abilities, to such an extent that it interferes with a person’s daily life and activities.

Vascular dementia and vascular cognitive impairment (VCI) are caused by injuries to the vessels supplying blood to the brain. These disorders can be caused by brain damage from multiple strokes or any injury to the small vessels carrying blood to the brain.

Alcohol-related dementia is a broad term currently preferred among medical professionals.

Many experts use the terms alcohol (or alcoholic) dementia to describe a specific form of ARD, characterized by impaired executive function (planning, thinking, and judgment).

Another form of ARD is known as wet brain (Wernicke-Korsakoff syndrome), characterized by short term memory loss and thiamine (vitamin B1) deficiency. ARD patients often have symptoms of both forms, i.e. impaired ability to plan, apathy, and memory loss. ARD may occur with other forms of dementia (mixed dementia). The diagnosis of ARD is widely recognized but rarely applied, due to a lack of specific diagnostic criteria.

Almost 40 per cent of people over the age of 65 experience some form of memory loss. When there is no underlying medical condition causing this memory loss, it is known as "age-associated memory impairment," which is considered a part of the normal aging process.

Brain diseases like Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias are different.

Age-associated memory impairment and dementia can be told apart in a number of ways.

A range of tests and diagnostic procedures is needed to diagnose dementia, but there are several that are fairly commonly used to diagnose dementia.

These tests for dementia are mainly tests of mental abilities, blood tests and brain scans.

Tests can help the doctor learn whether dementia is caused by a treatable condition. Even for those dementias that cannot be reversed, knowing the type of dementia a person has can help the doctor prescribe medicines or other treatments that may improve mood and behavior and help the family.

Brain is an intangible conundrum which buries millions and millions of memories.

Entrepreneurship is the process of designing a new business, i.e. a startup company offering a product, process or service.

We are convinced that these new approaches to entrepreneurship research will have high impact and will lead to some of the most exciting and best publications in the years to come.

Bringing these new approaches together in one track will provide a forum for some of the best scholars in the field to join Vascular Dementia Conference 2016 and it will provide the audience with a look into the future of entrepreneurship research.