Karen Harrison Dening

Recognition and assessment of pain in people with advanced dementia

The definition of pain has evolved over time; it is generally described as an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with, or resembling the experience associated with, actual or...

An ageing population: what does this mean for spousal carers and the person with dementia?

The population of England and Wales is ageing, with the number of people aged 65–79 years predicted to increase by nearly a third to over 10 million in the next 40 years. Furthermore, those aged 80...

Supporting distress behaviours in people with dementia in the community

Stress is a naturally occurring adaptation reaction in human beings in response to internal or external threats to homeostasis (Lecic-Tosevski et al, 2011). People with dementia, as with any person,...

Dementia, comorbidity and multimorbidity

Research has shown that, in addition to their dementia diagnosis, 61% of people living with dementia have at least three other comorbid conditions (Timmons et al, 2016). The terms comorbidity and...

What would Tom Kitwood have thought?

The late Tom Kitwood, building on the work of Carl Rogers, developed the concept of person-centred care for people with dementia (Kitwood, 1997). Proposed first in the late 1980s at the University of...

Community support for families affected by dementia

David was 70 years of age when he first started to notice problems with his memory. Initially, this was just forgetting appointments, and occasionally struggling to find the right words, but over time...

Dementia and communication

Dementia, what ever the subtype, is caused by underlying disease processes and damage to the nerve cells in the brain. This damage impairs our executive function - the processes in our brains which...

Caring for a person living with dementia: identifying and assessing a carer's needs

Lewis and colleagues (2014) estimated that there are in excess of 700 000 unpaid carers supporting people living with dementia. They went on to suggest that if the ratio of unpaid carers to people...

Modifiable and non-modifiable risk factors for dementia: what primary care nurses need to know

While there is yet to be a cure for dementia, we know more about its causes and some of the life course factors that may increase a person's risk of developing the condition later in life. The risks...

Dementia: recognition and cognitive testing in community and primary care settings

The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE, 2018) guideline, amongst many other things, recommends people thought to have dementia receive timely access to an assessment with the...

Dementia is everybody's business: a call for issues, learning needs and case studies