Interactive therapy is the newest and most promising form of treatment for people suffering from dementia. "Dementia is a syndrome often characterized by a progressive deterioration of a person's mental ability" (Jacoby 395). It is said that in people over the age of 65, between 5 and 10 percent will suffer some form of this syndrome (Hynd 435). The symptoms of dementia are, as of right now, are irreversible. All types of therapy and treatments improve the quality of life for patients suffering from many different symptoms of dementia. .
The term dementia describes a decline of skills that once were strong, but now have deteriorated away over time. There are several different symptoms of dementia including, behavioral problems (affecting cognition), disorientation, and loss of ability to care for one's self. Patients suffer from forgetting normal behavioral patterns such as poor judgment and spending money inappropriately. This is known as cognition. There are two kinds of cognition problems that patients suffer from, such as cortical dementia and subcortia dementia. Cortical dementia is not being able to do gross motor movements, language disturbance, and memory loss. All of the cortical dementia symptoms lead to subcortia dementia such as Huntington's disease (HD) or Parkinson's disease (PD), forgetfulness, impaired planning, judgment and mood changes (Benedict 110). Disorientation also affects the elderly because when they are suffering from dementia they go through spells where they do not know where they are or what is going on. They wander and are confused about things that surround them. Sometimes when people do not know where they are, they will do irrational things such as turning on a stove and leaving it on all day or turning the water on for a bath and accidentally forgetting about it. People tend to have a difficult time caring for themselves when they are disoriented.