What is Lewy Body Dementia - Causes, Symptoms, and Treatment

Are you continuously hallucinating unrealistic visions and sounds? There is a probability that you are suffering from Lewy body dementia. However, to confirm this, you must go through the symptoms of this disease. If the signs match, then you must consult a doctor immediately for proper diagnosis and treatment.

Lewy body dementia, also called LBD, is a nervous disorder resulting in hallucinations and gradual loss of intellectual function. This disease occurs in the later stages of life and has no cure. Once this happens, you can only take a few medicines to deal with the symptoms.

There are several types of LBD that you must know to identify the one that you are going through.

The types of Lewy body dementia are as follows:

• Dementia with Lewy bodies: This begins with difficulty in moving your body and gradually leads to loss of memory and hallucinations within a year.
• Parkinson’s disease dementia: In the early stages of this dementia, you will only face problems in moving. However, thinking ability also gets affected in the later stages of this disease.

Lewy body disease symptoms can be broadly classified into cognitive symptoms and body movement symptoms. The cognitive symptoms are:

• Visual hallucinations: You can hallucinate several things that are not present in reality.
• Non-visual hallucinations: You hear and smell several things as a part of hallucination.
• Loss of thinking ability: You can face poor thinking abilities concerning daily tasks, which can lead to confusion and poor judgement.
• Changes in concentration: Your concentration toward work or study might dwindle significantly.

The symptoms that you can notice during body movement are:

• Muscle rigidity: You can lose the flexibility of your body and face severe muscle stiffness.
• Stooped posture: There can be a prominent stooping of your posture, indicating towards this disease.
• Continuous shaking: Your body can shake continuously even when you are not moving at all.
• Repeated unbalancing: You might have difficulty maintaining your body's balance and fall frequently.
• Loss of coordination: There can be severe prominent incidents of miscoordination between your body parts.
• Weak voice: Your voice can tremble tremendously while speaking.
• Reduced facial expression: Your facial expressions can fall flat, indicating miscoordination between thoughts and gestures.

Additionally, there are some behavioural symptoms that you can notice:

• Anxiety: You might be constantly anxious about any serious or made-up things.
• Depression: You will feel depression very prominently, even if there is not much reason for the same.
• Agitation: You might get agitated event at a simple conversation or incident.
• Insomnia: Losing the night’s sleep is another common symptom that can help identify the disease.
• Sleep disorder: Sleep disorders are pervasive in patients suffering from this disease.
• Restless leg: You might end up continuously shaking your leg without any prominent reason.
• Delusions: You might face several delusions during your daily activities that can confuse you as well as others.
• Excess daytime sleep: Since the night sleep is lost, you will often find yourself sleepy during the daytime.
• Paranoia: You might face paranoia even at the simplest things that are happening around you.
• Apathy: You might lose motivation in every work of your life.

Additionally, a few other symptoms that you can look for are:

• Dizziness: You can experience dizziness even at the slightest of things without any particular reason.
• Sexual dysfunction: You might face a noticeable reduction in libido, which is also indicative of this disease.
• Change in body temperature: There can be a sudden inexplicable change in your body temperature.
• Frequent fainting: You can faint multiple times simply due to weakness and without any particular reason.
• Inability to smell: You will be unable to receive any smell of correctly.
• Constipation: This is a common symptom that you can notice along with the other symptoms.
• Increased sensitivity to heat and cold: There will be a notable increase in your sensitivity towards heat and cold.

Although the individual symptoms are prevalent, a combination of these symptoms can be highly indicative towards this disease. There can be several causes leading to the development of this disease.

The root cause of Lewy body disease is clumping of proteins inside brain cells. Researchers believe that these clumps interfere with signal transmission between brain cells. This disrupts the normal functioning of the brain.

However, there is no strong evidence yet stating how the proteins clump inside the brain or how it affects the brain’s function. Apart from these causes, there are several factors that can prominently increase your risk of developing this disease.

The risk factors increasing the chances of Lewy body disease are as follows:

• Age: With an increase in age, people become more prone to this disease.
• Genetics: If there is a family member suffering from this disease, there is a high chance of getting affected by it.
• Sex: It has been observed that males tend to suffer more from this disease than females.

However, before these factors escalate the chances of dementia excessively, you must consult a doctor for a proper diagnosis.

Below are some ways in which doctors diagnose Lewy body dementia:

• Knowing your medical history: The doctor will ask you about your medical history and any medications and supplements that you are currently taking. Also, they might enquire about your family’s medical history.
• Detailed physical examination: The doctor will physically examine you for symptoms.
• Various imaging tests: Doctors mainly suggest these imaging tests rule out the possibilities of other diseases. This is important as the symptoms of this condition are somewhat similar to other diseases.
• Blood tests: These tests are also done to rule out the possibility of diseases such as HIV or syphilis, as they share some common symptoms. Also, they conduct these tests to check for vitamin B12 deficiency and rule out this possibility.
• Neurobiological examinations: These tests are essential to check your memory, visual-spatial skills, attention, word finding and other thinking abilities. This way, doctors can adequately assess your mental faculties.
• Studying sleep cycle: Since an abnormal sleep cycle is a prominent symptom of this disease, doctors might ask you to sleep in their lab overnight to monitor this disorder. Accordingly, they can keep a note of your sleep cycle and your breathing patterns, heart and brain activity and limb movement.

Once the diagnosis is completed and the results are positive, you should proceed with treatment immediately.

There is no treatment for Lewy body dementia as such. However, doctors can suggest some medications to manage the symptoms that an LBD patient faces. These include:

• Carbidopa – levodopa: Doctors generally prescribe these medicines to treat tremors that occur during dementia.

• Cholinesterase inhibitors: These usually help you to deal with the changes in your thinking process due to LBD.

• Pimavanserin: Doctors mainly suggest this medicine to treat hallucinations that appear due to LBD.

• Antidepressants: Medicines such as Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors (SSRIs) help you in dealing with depression which is a common symptom of this disease.

• Melatonin and Clonazepam: Doctors prescribe these medicines to treat sleep disorders such as REM.

• Memantine: These medicines help in treating people in their early stages of dementia.

Apart from these medications, you can also turn to several therapies, such as:

• Psychotherapy: For this, you can join different support groups, share your story with people suffering from similar conditions and find emotional support.
• Physical therapy: You can go exercising daily to improve the movement and balance of your body.

Occupational therapy: With this therapy, you can learn how to perform your daily tasks with ease despite LBD.

You must consult a doctor as soon as you start noticing the symptoms. This will ensure that you get a proper diagnosis and timely treatment for your symptoms to a certain extent.

There are no such precautionary measures for Lewy body dementia. All you can do is take your medicines on time to dampen the severity of this disease and preserve your mind and body’s functionality as much as possible. With proper therapy and care, the symptoms can be managed for a sufficient time.