Adolescents’ experiences and perceptions of dementia

Abstract

Objectives: There is a lack of understanding about how adolescents perceive dementia, and what their dementia related experiences are. Without such information, it is hard to make a case for the need to raise awareness of dementia in adolescents, and the best strategies to achieve this.

Methods: In a cohort of 901 adolescents (aged 13–18) from the South East of England, we explored what the experiences and perceptions of dementia were using a series of questionnaires. Descriptive data of individual items were reported, comparing differences between genders.

Results: The adolescents within this study tended to have positive or neutral attitudes towards dementia, though there was evidence that a proportion of adolescents had misconceptions or held negative attitudes (e.g. 28.5% of adolescents disagreed with the statement ‘In general, I have positive attitudes about people with dementia’). We also identified that the adolescents had a range of experiences of dementia including providing some form of care for someone with dementia (23.2%), though most had indirect contact with dementia through TV and movies (77.3%), or adverts (80.2%). Females nearly always had better attitudes towards dementia and had significantly more contact with dementia.

Conclusions: Considering that adolescents are already forming negative attitudes and misconceptions of dementia, it is important that we raise awareness about dementia in this age group.

Keywords:

• Gender
• teenagers
• attitudes
• dementia
• ageing
• contact

Acknowledgements

Thank you to the secondary schools and adolescents that participated in the research. We are particularly appreciative of the staff within the schools who helped facilitate the research.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.