Is There Any Way to Prevent Dementia-Related Psychosis?

While there is no way you can keep a loved one from developing dementia-related psychosis, there are red flags that someone may be in early stages of the disease, says George Grossberg, M.D., professor and director of geriatric psychiatry at Saint Louis University School of Medicine in Missouri. Treatment may be more successful if it is started before the condition progresses.

The notion of prevention of dementia-related psychosis is a great question. I wish I had a great answer for it. I mean, obviously minimizing and eliminating stress of any sort as best as we can. Acute stressors, trying to minimize triggers, and as far as I know, there's not a whole lot sometimes that we can do to totally prevent the onset of dementia-related psychosis.

Because of that, it's really, really important, as we mentioned earlier, to recognize the symptoms early, to educate the caregivers because they're the ones they're going to recognize it. Most of the time, the patients are not aware. They're not going to tell you, I'm hallucinating. I'm seeing things. I'm hearing things. I think everything's poisoned that's been given to me. They're not going to say that.

The caregivers are the ones who are going to notice and they're the ones that need to be educated, whether it's the family caregivers, and someone who's living at home being taken care of by the family, or the professional caregivers, the nursing staff and so on, and people who are living in assisted living memory care, or the spectrum of long-term care.