Cultural representations of dementia

Dementia has been positioned as one of the global health priorities of our age This positioning has been accompanied by an increased attention from governments, biological and clinical sciences, practitioners, care providers, and the wider public, laying the foundations for a cultural preoccupation with loss of memory. As Margaret Lock [2], an American cultural anthropologist, suggests, Alzheimer disease (AD) and other Alzheimer-like dementias personify all that is most feared about growing old-a fear widely expressed in research on aging and experiences of aging (e.g.,