Dementia Care Expert Reveals Early Signs of Dementia That Shows Up When You Go Grocery Shopping

One day Chris Nelson left her Stony Plain home with her husband Carl to visit a local grocery supermarket. While her husband was in a different store section, she contacted a retail assistant to find a product. As the assistant told her, Nelson reached aisle no. 35, but by this time she was confused and couldn’t find the item. She walked back and requested assistance. The employee went mad at her, not knowing that she suffered from dementia. This confusion and desolation is experienced by countless dementia patients, many of whom don’t even know about their condition. Emma Hewat, head of dementia at the KYN Care Home in London recently revealed to Express.co.uk how getting confused during shopping can be an early warning sign of dementia.  

“Obvious symptoms of dementia can include memory loss and difficulty concentrating, getting confused over the correct change when shopping, struggling to follow a conversation or finding the right words to say. Other common symptoms include finding it hard to carry out familiar daily tasks, being confused about time and place, and, often, mood changes,” explained Hewat.

Another warning sign of dementia could appear in the form of obsessive or compulsive shopping behaviors, such as buying something they already have at home, doctor Catherine Jenkins, an associate professor in dementia care at Birmingham City University, told The Sun. It can look “like going to the shop and thinking, ‘Oh! I need to get a tin of salmon’, then when they get home they find the cupboard is already full of tins of salmon,” illustrated Jenkins.

Memory loss can also look like struggling with numbers or the person’s inability to keep count of their cash or credit cards. Nelson said the hardest thing for her while standing in a line-up is to count change. “You feel dumb because you can’t count change,” she expressed. The symptom could also present itself as experiencing difficulty in paying a shopping bill or calculating the tip at a restaurant, according to Kensington Park Senior Living. A dementia patient can also go on to make an unusually high number of credit card purchases, strange purchases that are not required, or purchases of the same item in oddly large quantities.

Adding to the confusion, the NHS explains that dementia is not actually a disease in itself, but a collection of symptoms. These symptoms appear according to what part of the brain is damaged. Other symptoms of the condition include difficulty in concentration, confusion about time, place, or location, and mood changes among others. Most of these symptoms are mild and often termed "mild cognitive impairment" (MCI). MCI may not worsen with time and may not always be recognizable by friends and family of the patient.

In Nelson’s case, she was diagnosed with “frontotemporal dementia,” which is the most common type of dementia in people under 65, according to NHS. This condition manifests in the patient in the form of reduced emotional sensitivity, lack of social awareness, apathy, difficulty finding the right words during conversations, overeating, or obsessive eating. However, early diagnosis can help the patient and their family to better manage the condition. Besides, the suffering of patients could be immensely reduced only “if the stores were more accommodating,” and “restaurant workers had more patience,” said Nelson.