Stable attention and awareness
Delirium↓
Also searched as Acute confusion · Delirium.
Its speed is the tell. Where cognitive decline creeps, delirium arrives in hours, and it is often reversible when the cause is found.
In depth
An acute, fluctuating disturbance of attention and awareness — distinct from dementia, which arrives slowly.
What it drives
It reduces Memory & focus.
A meta-analysis of longitudinal cohorts found that patients who experienced delirium had significantly greater subsequent cognitive decline than non-delirious controls, and that the effect persisted after adjustment for baseline cognition, illness severity and age. doi 10.1001/jamaneurol.2020.2273 · PMID 32658246
Blends that modulate it
Each blend page names this pathway and carries the study behind its claim.
See it on the map
Open the causal map to follow this pathway upstream and downstream, arrow by arrow, each with its study.