Sexual Behavior Among Adults with Dementia Living at Home

ConclusionThe majority of partnered, home-dwelling people in the U.S. with dementia are sexually active, according to a University of Chicago Medicine study in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society. In addition, people with cognitive impairment and dementia often have bothersome sexual function problems they don ’t discuss with a doctor.“Until now, most of what we knew on this topic came from studies or legal cases involving people with advanced dementia living in nursing homes,” said lead study author Stacy Tessler-Lindau, MD, MAPP, and UChicago Medicine professor.“In the next 30 years, more than 80 million people in the U.S. will be 65 or older. A growing number of people with dementia live at home, cared for by a spouse who, like doctors and society more generally, don’t have the knowledge they need to manage the sexual aspects of life with a person wit h dementia,” she said.This study is the first to look at a nationally representative sample of this population.The number of home-dwelling people with Alzheimer ’s Disease (the most common type of dementia) is expected to grow to more than eight million by 2050.Care of Dementia Patients, It's Not Your FaultAdditional Findings“The lack of basic information about sexual behavior, function and desires in this growing population is a problem,” said Lindau, “because these aspects of life with dementia raise ethical, legal, clinical and even moral questions that we as a society are largely unprep...
Source: Alzheimer's Reading Room, The - Category: Neurology Tags: alzheimers dementia dementia care dementia sex health research sexual behavior women Source Type: blogs