{3:50 minutes to read} Cognitive problems are most commonly thought to be the result of head trauma, Alzheimer’s disease, or dementia. However, there are additional conditions that can cause many types of cognitive issues. These types of cognitive conditions can be quite disabling resulting in symptoms including:
- Short-term memory loss;
- Long-term memory loss;
- Inability to focus; and
- Difficulty processing and understanding information.
If you are suffering from these issues, your ability to work is going to be severely compromised. Unfortunately, many people don’t realize that they are suffering from cognitive loss in addition to their more apparent illnesses or injuries.
Are you disabled due to a cognitive problem?
There are many illnesses and injuries that people don’t realize can cause cognitive problems. If you’re taking prescription medications to control the symptoms of an illness or disease, those medications may affect your ability to process and remember information.
An important question to always ask your doctor is whether your medication is known for having cognitive side effects. If you are on a regimen of prescription medication that is known to cause dizziness, drowsiness, or disorientation that may leave you anxious, you need to consider whether or not they are affecting you cognitively. Some of the most common cognitive problems occur while trying to control pain, manage psychiatric symptoms, or manage sleep problems. In these situations, there is a multitude of problems where medications are known to impact the ability to function normally from a cognitive perspective.
Aside from medication, many conditions exist that quite often produce cognitive problems. Examples include:
- Lyme disease
- Parkinson’s disease
- Multiple sclerosis
- Chronic fatigue syndrome
- Fibromyalgia
- Migraines
- Chemotherapy treatments for cancer
- Depression
- Sleep disorders
- Chronic pain
This is by no means an exhaustive list, merely a sampling of the conditions that can cause the sort of cognitive problems people don’t even realize they’re suffering from.
If you are suffering from an illness or a disease that you think is producing cognitive problems, your doctor can refer you to a specialist who is trained to measure cognitive loss. That specialist is called a neuropsychologist. This a psychologist with specific training, who performs a series of cognitive tests in order to determine whether your functioning is compromised due to cognitive loss.
If you are suffering from a disabling condition and you’re questioning whether the condition limits your working ability, you should consider whether you are also suffering from cognitive symptoms.
Evan S. Schwartz
Founder of Schwartz, Conroy & Hack
833-824-5350
[email protected]
