ABSTRACT
References 81
The behavioural and psychological symptoms of dementia (BPSD) have been defined as ‘a heterogenous range of psychological reactions, psychiatric symptoms and behaviours occurring in people with dementia of any aetiology’ (Finkel and Burns, 2000) and include: disorders of behaviour, mood, thought content and perception (Burns et al., 1990a; Burns et al., 1990b; Burns et al., 1990c; Burns et al., 1990d), and disorder of personality alteration (Shah et al., 2005). The definition of any individual BPSD should be hierarchical and allow discrimination between the cognitive and BPSD domains, different BPSD domains, and individual symptoms within a given BPSD domain (Shah, 2000).
