dementiae

It is not just that what has been served up in our two opera houses has been either inertly routine or strangely misguided, but that this should be accepted as the norm by both public and press that induces all manner of dementiae.

1973 December 29, The Spectator, page 849, column 4

Or, second, are these imitation responses related to the oral reflex observed in the development of certain senile dementiae?[…]If such an analogy made sense, this would mean that neonatal imitation might be a reflex similar to the grasping reflex or to the cardinal points, reflexes which disappear in the first six months of life and, in some cases, reappear in senile dementiae.

1990, Claude-Alain Hauert, “Developmental Psychology: A Brief Inventory of Fixtures”, in Developmental Psychology: Cognitive, Perceptuo-Motor and Neuropsychological Perspectives (Advances in Psychology; 64), North-Holland, pages 421–422

The increasing aging of the population determines a constant growth of the dementiae until becoming a real epidemic.

1993, Recent Advances in Aging Science, page 723

Dementiae can arise from such things as depression, drug reactions and nutritional deficiencies as well as from brain disease.

1998 November, Judy Dothard Simmons, “Alzheimer’s Disease News Mixed: Prevention, cure still elusive but treatment picture improves”, in The New Crisis: The Magazine of Opportunities and Ideas, page 33, column 1

“Hello?” she said. I tried to gauge by the tone of her voice and the look in her eyes the stage of her mind’s undoing, but she was not my mother, and no two dementiae sing the same tune.

2005, Rafi Zabor, I, Wabenzi: A Souvenir, New York, N.Y.: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, pages 91–92