You are here

Article Text

Article menu
Download PDFPDF
Editorial commentary
Neuropsychiatric symptoms of dementia: are pharmacological treatments effective and safe?
  1. Andrew H Ford
  1. Correspondence to Dr Andrew H Ford, WA Centre for Health & Ageing, Centre for Medical Research & School of Psychiatry & Clinical Neurosciences (M573), University of Western Australia, 35 Stirling Highway, Crawley, Perth, WA 6009, Australia; andrew.ford{at}uwa.edu.au

http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/jnnp-2014-308420

Statistics from Altmetric.com

    Dementia affects approximately 5% of people over the age of 65. While cognitive impairment is central to the dementia concept, non-cognitive symptoms invariably occur at some point in the illness. These neuropsychiatric symptoms are diverse in nature but are associated with a number of adverse outcomes for the individual and their caregivers. Management of these symptoms can be difficult and can initially include a range of non-pharmacological approaches. Pharmacological approaches are usually reserved for more severe presentations and their use should include a thorough risk–benefit appraisal and discussion with the patient/caregiver. A number of medications are used in the …

    View Full Text

    Footnotes

    • Competing interests None.

    • Provenance and peer review Commissioned; internally peer reviewed.

    Request Permissions

    If you wish to reuse any or all of this article please use the link below which will take you to the Copyright Clearance Center’s RightsLink service. You will be able to get a quick price and instant permission to reuse the content in many different ways.

    Copyright information:

    Published by the BMJ Publishing Group Limited. For permission to use (where not already granted under a licence) please go to http://group.bmj.com/group/rights-licensing/permissions

    Linked Articles