How does your brain with Alzheimer Disease or Dementia deal with pain or notify your body of said pain in a biological or physiological way? Is there a delayed reaction or that delay is extended ?
Quoted because my app doesn’t show the title when writing comments.
Aight, so you gotta understand that my grasp of Alzheimer’s isn’t even master’s level, okay? It’s more first hand backed up by reading at a non academic level. So, grain of salt, and it’s an old grain since Alzheimer’s isn’t on my priority list for continuing education.
That being said, there’s essentially no difference in nociception in Alzheimer’s, or most forms of what would be called dementia (though some diseases that cause dementia may interfere or alter nociception).
To rephrase, what happens during the forms of dementia you’re asking about doesn’t cause a change in how the body and brain respond to pain. What it can do is change how whatever consciousness remains responses to that pain.
As in, a demented patient may scream and cry more than a person without dementia because they lack the capacity to process it any other way.
And there is a difference between the physiological side of pain and the mental/psychological side of it. Our ability to at least partially influence what we do in response to the perception of pain is significant. That’s what patients with dementia lack. They can’t “cope” as well.
So, essentially, the process is the same as in a person without a disease.
So the way that alzheimers disease works is not by signal delay but in wrong interpretations. Its like translating French-English but the input is Spanish. There are words that are similar enough to get the point but sentence is still nonsensical.
There is still an appropriate pain response but theres also delusion/hallucination.
Someone with peripheral neuropathy, such as from diabetes or ALS, can have delayed or no response (sometimes phantom signals).
I don’t know much, but the little I do pain seems to make hallucinations worse. From some friends in nursing a lot of older people really get worse, especially after hip injuries and leg injuries
