WARNING SIGNS OF DEMENTIA

A guide to 13 symptoms you should never ignore

- Mark Witten

STEPHEN CHOW KNEW something was off when, in 2010, he started making more spelling errors and typos in his work emails. The 51-year-old IT specialist from Toronto tried to ignore the mistakes, but the situation became more obvious when attempts to punch in his password kept failing. Gradually, he found it harder to focus and perform simple, familiar tasks, such as calculating numbers or signing a document.

“Everything was all messed up, and I didn’t know what to do about it,” he says. Not wanting his wife, Eva, and two adult sons to worry, he kept it a secret, hoping he could just muddle through.

Instead, over the next few years, more alarming symptoms appeared. As Chow made the daily 90-minute drive to and from work, he had trouble seeing the centre line on the road, and the cars beside him. In early 2014, his patchy vision almost killed him when he slid into the ditch during a snowstorm. He was unharmed, but his anxiety mounted, and he decided to talk to his family doctor.

When Chow described his difficulties with typing and driving—both related to motor skills—his physician referred him to a specialist in Parkinson’s disease. That condition was ruled out. In May 2014, Chow met with Dr Carmela Tartaglia, a cognitive neurologist specializing in early-onset dementia at Toronto Western Hospital.

Tartaglia suspected Chow’s symptoms were visual-spatial processing problems, a warning sign of Alzheimer’s disease. Weeks later, an MRI showed a shrinkage of cortical tissue in the back of his brain—the region involved in processing what and how we see. Biomarkers identified in his cerebrospinal fluid 18 months later finally confirmed, six years after Chow first noticed his symptoms, that he had early-onset Alzheimer’s disease.