Neurocognitive disorders encompass those disorders in which the main symptom is a deficit in cognitive function that has not been present since birth or early childhood, and is therefore acquired.
This includes dementia of the Alzheimer’s type, vascular dementia, HIV dementia, Lewy body dementia, dementia due to head trauma or dementia associated with Parkinson’s disease, among many other less frequent ones, such as huntington.
When we talk about deficits in cognitive function, we mean that higher functions are affected such as complex attention, memory, learning, executive function (planning, decision-making, working memory, mental flexibility…), language (expressive and receptive), emotion recognition, and perceptual motor skills (eg, facial recognition, drawing, copying objects…).
The person could initially present forgetfulness, forgetfulness, which would become more evident over time. You could get disoriented on the street, or present changes in your way of being.
It is very important to distinguish dementia from pseudodementia: older people with depression often present some of the symptoms that occur in dementia, without this meaning that they present it.
With proper treatment, these symptoms disappear.