A Relationship between Depression and Wandering in Community-Dwelling Elders with Dementia

Wandering is one of the most common and exhausting behavioral and psychological symptoms of dementia for caregivers.1 Also, it has adverse outcomes on patient such as getting lost,2 malnutrition,1 weight loss,3 fatigue, sleep disturbance,4 social isolation,5 earlier institutionalization,6 and injury.7 The term ‘wandering’ is frequently used as a broad term encompassing a diverse set of behaviors and is often considered as a kind of agitated behavior.8 In 2007, a scientific definition of wandering was suggested as ‘a syndrome of dementia-related locomotion behavior having a frequent, repetitive, temporally-disordered, and/or spatially-disoriented nature that is manifested in lapping, random, and/or pacing patterns, some of which are associated with eloping, eloping attempts, or getting lost unless accompanied’.9 Previous studies estimated the rates of wandering as 17.4% in community dwelling patients with dementia,10 18.7% in drug-naÏve Alzheimer disease patients,11 21% to 67.5% in nursing home residents.12-14 Longitudinal studies indicate that wandering behavior starts on the average 10 months after diagnosis of dementia in 40% of individuals,15 but eventually occurs in 80% of all patients with dementia.16 In a large, multiethnic sample of community-dwelling patients, wandering was A Relationship between Depression and Wandering in Community-Dwelling Elders with Dementia