I have had one grandparent with Lewy body (farmer, extensive 60s and 70s pesticide exposure), and one with vascular dementia (serious sugar-fat addict, who refused to alter her diet to manage Type II, which contributed to/caused the massive inflammation that leads to narrowing arteries). Both were text-book cases, and Tantrump's behavior reminds me far more of my grandmother than my grandfather.
His early symptoms were perceptual changes and balance issues; her early symptoms were irritability, a shortening attention span, and a narrowing of her vocabulary. His attention span remained normal until well into his illness; he did switch from hardwood whittling to softwood, then soap and wax, as his fine motor control diminished, but he continued to carve until very late. He also got big into video games in the mid-stage, which I think was somewhat protective of his hand-eye coordination and attention. He was cognitively sharp enough to engage in card games until his last year, even after he lost a lot of speech. He was a brutal UNO player, even in a family of cut-throat UNO players. His personality and cognition didn't alter much until the late stage.
She was a big novel reader, and then she wasn't. First she switched to magazines, then stopped reading altogether. Her finances tail-spinned at least three times in two years, because she would forget where she put money or forget to record or deposit a check, and her math (never great) went wonky. After she retired from her RN's career, she took on a second career. She had been a talented cook who managed her fraternal organization's kitchen (which served 300+ meals 4 or 5 nights a week) for years. Then that stopped suddenly, and within about a year, she mostly stopped cooking at all, but not before at least two minor kitchen fires. And she was irritable all the time. She picked fights with so many people in those three or four years before the first real stroke that I stopped counting how many people she alienated. I heard her vocabulary contract over the course of the year before her first stroke. She'd get stuck in loops of speech, and sometimes in actions. But she got very charming in that year before the first stroke, too -- she'd always been surface charming (and manipulative -- there's a reason the two of them divorced in the early 60s) but she got more so in that year, because (as I now know, having read the research and done the retrospective) charm covers cognitive deficits. She got increasingly defensive, and she'd get a bee in her bonnet and call somebody early in the morning or late at night just to rant about something. Then deny that she did it, or deny that the person whose head she bit off had a right to be offended. (Early dementia can look a lot like narcissism, and narcissism is not improved by dementia...) Her social skills remained good enough to cover casual observation and even some level of professional evaluation, but her attention and her executive function cratered fast, and her emotional maturity regressed, to the point where she was emotionally about 13 (including being in LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOVE with a married man who scammed her out of several thousand dollars in the year between the first and second stroke and being totally unable to see why having an affair with a conman was a bad thing).
Tantrump looks a lot like vascular dementia on top of narcissism.
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He can't walk properly anymore either.
