Neurology

Cognitive impairment: Dementia

Dementia is a degenerative disease that causes serious memory disorders and loss of intellectual abilities, behavioral and language alterations, which progressively interferes with the patient's daily activities until they become completely dependent.
Causes of dementia: Alzheimer's, Lewy body disease, frontotemporal dementia, vascular dementia, secondary dementias.

Cerebrovascular disease: Stroke, ACVA.

Stroke is the appearance of a neurological deficit caused by a heart attack or cerebral hemorrhage. The symptoms can be varied (loss of strength or sensitivity, difficulties with language, walking or vision, etc.). The most common causes of strokes are related to vascular risk factors. Stroke is a more common disease in patients over 65 years of age, but it can also affect young people or even children. It is the second cause of death in Spaniards and the first cause of death among women.

Extrapyramidal diseases: Parkinson's

Parkinson's disease and parkinsonism are progressive. They are characterized by slowness, clumsiness and poverty of movement. In addition, they may have other symptoms such as tremor, chorea, dystonia and others. They are very disabling diseases if they are not treated and can generate great dependency on third parties for basic activities of daily living.

Headaches and facial pain

Migraine, tension headache, cluster headache, trigeminal neuralgia and others. Migraine is a very common disease. Approximately it affects 16% of women and 8% of men. Many times during the episode this becomes very disabling.

Epilepsy

It is a unique disease from a historical point of view. There is no other disease comparable to it in its clinical manifestations. It is defined as the disease that presents epileptic seizures. And epileptic seizures are defined as clinical manifestations that are believed to be due to an excessive and abnormal discharge of a group of neurons in the brain.

Multiple sclerosis

Multiple sclerosis is a disease in which the immune system attacks the myelin of the central nervous system. It usually occurs in outbreaks of disease (but be careful, not every symptom is an outbreak of disease, a very common mistake among lay people). It mainly affects young adults and is one of the highest causes of morbidity in this age group. There are several clinical forms. And today we have multiple treatments. In addition to MS, there are other diseases where the immune system is involved: neuromyelitis optica, MOGAD, autoimmune encephalitis, cerebral paraneoplastic syndrome.

Neuromuscular diseases

This is a very broad chapter that includes a wide variety of diseases that have very diverse origins and affect very different areas of the body. We talk about polyneuropathies, mononeuropathies. Of the best known are motor neuron diseases and among them amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (not to be confused with multiple sclerosis). There is also a group of diseases that affect the muscle and some of them can leave people very disabled and even shorten their life, such as muscular dystrophies and other muscle diseases.