Dementia: a Journey of Caring
On September 21, 2013, the world is to celebrate the "World Alzheimer's Day", under the theme: (Dementia: a Journey of Caring). The main purpose of the World Alzheimer's Day is to be identified with the hardships and challenges of the dementia disease (Alzheimer), and to shed light on it, as well as the suffering of its victims around the world. It also calls for exerting every effort and working unremittingly, in order to enhance health care and increase support for Alzheimer's patients and their families.
Alzheimer's Disease:
Alzheimer's disease is a progressive disease of the brain leading to the irreversible loss of neurons and the loss of intellectual abilities, including memory and reasoning, which become severe enough to impede social or occupational functioning. Symptoms usually develop slowly and get worse over time, leading up to death in many cases. It was named (Alzheimer) after the German physician Alois Alzheimer, who had been the first to describe the disease in 1906, before scientists of the past century managed to discover a lot of important facts related to the disease.
Internationally:
It should be noted that the number of cases suffering from Alzheimer mounted in 2010 to 35.6 million patients around the world. This number is expected to be doubled to reach 65.7 million patients in 2030 and 115 million patients by 2050. It has been observed that the incidence of the disease is continuously increasing amid the middle-income and poor social classes.
Locally:
There are no official statistics on the spread of Alzheimer's disease in the Saudi Arabia, but experts estimate that there are at least 50 thousand patients in the Kingdom, most of them are women. The Saudi Alzheimer's Disease Association indicate that the chances of getting the disease double each 5 years among individuals aging more than 65 years, while that half of those aging over 85 years were found infected with the disease.
Internationally Approved Date: 21/9/2013
Locally Approved Date: 15/11/1434H
Theme of the World Alzheimer's Day 2013:
Dementia: a Journey of Caring
Targeted Groups:
Alzheimer's (Dementia) patients and their families.
The elderly.
Medical staff, including doctors, nurses, social workers and health educators.
The concerned health associations and institutions (Saudi Alzheimer's Disease Association).
The public.
Objectives and General Messages of the World Alzheimer's Day 2013:
The World Alzheimer's Day (Dementia) aims to draw attention to the local efforts exerted, and the international solutions, in an endeavor to accomplish the following:
- To encourage providing and enhancing the health care offered to Alzheimer's (Dementia) patients and their families.
- To improve and reinforce the health awareness regarding Alzheimer's (Dementia) disease around the world.
- To establish medical centers aiming to support Dementia patients and care for them throughout the different stages of the disease.
- To identify and record the number of Dementia (Alzheimer's) patients and launch a worldwide campaign to change the governmental policies in cooperation with the World Health Organization (WHO).
- To assess and develop the quality of the health care, social care, and other services offered to the Dementia patients.
Logo: