Brain disease patients given dementia misdiagnoses

PATIENTS with a treatable brain condition are being misdiagnosed with dementia, experts have warned, as 80 per cent of doctors admitted they cannot spot the symptoms.

Autoimmune encephalitis occurs when the brain starts attacking itself for reasons not fully understood and it affects at least 2,000 people a year.

It has similar symptoms to dementia, with patients experiencing memory loss, cognitive problems, changes of personality and seizures. But specialists have warned that many people with the condition may be ending up in care homes diagnosed with dementia, or even placed on psychiatric wards, even though there are treatments available.

Research from Encephalitis International released for World Encephalitis Day found that eight in 10 A&E doctors and nurses are unable to recognise the symptoms. A study in the Netherlands found that up to half of patients who had autoimmune encephalitis had symptoms which could be mistaken for dementia, and dementia had been considered as a possible diagnosis.

Prof Benedict Michael, director of the Infection Neuroscience Lab at the University of Liverpool, said: “Its symptoms are often confused with those of better-known conditions such as dementia, psychosis, meningitis, tumours, stroke, migraine and UTIS [urinary tract infections] in the elderly, leading to delayed or misdiagnosis.”

More than half of healthcare workers surveyed also said they would struggle to spot the symptoms of viral encephalitis, which occurs when a viral infection causes inflammation in the brain.

In total, encephalitis causes up to 2,400 deaths in Britain each year.