6 dementia symptoms that can show up years before diagnosis: Early warning signs you shouldn't ignore

Most people picture dementia only as memory loss, confusion, and forgetting familiar faces. But the truth behind these symptoms is that these changes don’t happen overnight. And they don’t always start with memory problems. Experts believe the biological changes to the brain during the first and second stages of dementia may cause emotional, sensory, and physical symptoms even years before a potential diagnosis.Timothy Chang, an associate professor of neurology at UCLA, tells The Washington Post, “You can have many of these other precursors but not have any cognitive symptoms.”Years, even decades, before a doctor makes a diagnosis, many people actually deal with signs that look like something else entirely. Maybe it’s mood swings, sleep troubles, a change in how you walk, strange changes in smell, or a shift in behavior.