Cultural representations of dementia

Dementia has been positioned as one of the global health priorities of our age [1]. 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 oldÐa fear widely expressed in research on aging and experiences of aging (e.g., [3]).