Podcasts and Audio

The Mad Woman in the Attic

According to the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, more than half of all residents in any aged care facility will have been diagnosed with dementia, and of those diagnosed, two-thirds will be women. As of 2016, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, dementia is also the leading cause of death of women in Australia. In most cases, dementia - especially Alzheimer’s – is a diagnosis by exclusion. That is, it’s a diagnosis arrived at when all other probable causes have been excluded. Despite a number of near-misses, there’s no widely available guaranteed test you can do that definitively tells you someone has dementia. In fact, it can only be diagnosed with certainty on autopsy. Does anyone sense that there’s something amiss here? I do, and in this episode, we’re going to examine if it’s valid to ask the question: is dementia a diagnosis of convenience? That is, a way of dealing with that inconvenient mad-woman in the attic?