Early Anticipation of Dementia; A Step Towards Promoting Community Health: Review of Current Evidence

Abstract

Context: Prevention and early diagnosis of diseases such as dementia can interrupt the destruction, complications, and disabilities caused by the diseases, reduce costs, and improve the quality of life of patients. The current study aimed at overviewing the early premonitory dementia as a step forward to the promotion of health in the community.Evidence Acquisition: The current systematic review was conducted to systematically access relevant online -based studies on domestic and international databases (Magiran, SID, PubMed, Web of Science, Scopus) and the Google Scholar search engine with the following keywords: dementia, elderly, and early diagnostic tests, from 1996 to 2017. Results:Totally, 25 studies were selected. Differences were observed between the articles in terms of methodology, sample size, method of work, applied techniques, etc. The results showed that verbal and linguistic examination, memory, impairment in vision, and olfactory function can be some of the early indicators for dementia. Motor and language function tests are the most frequently studied tests for dementia screening. However, many other screening tests had comparable diagnostic abilities; cognitive tests had better performance than the other dementia screening tests; olfactory test is an easy test to detect dementia. Conclusions:Since mild cognitive impairment has adverse effects on the quality of life and performance, risk reduction is important. Early diagnosis and modifying major factors can postpone or prevent the onset of dementia during a mild cognitive phase.