Clouding of Consciousness - Differentiation

Differentiation

Clouding of consciousness is often confused with dementia-like impairments. Mild cognitive impairment is a dementia-like impairment where one can still function independently in daily affairs. The fundamental difference is that clouding of consciousness involves a disturbance of brain arousal whereas dementia-like impairments usually do not. The terms reversible cognitive deficit or persistent cognitive impairment found in geriatric literature are poorly defined, so it cannot be said whether they are delirium (clouding of consciousness), dementia, a comorbid mixture of both, or something else. Clouding of consciousness is not the same thing as depersonalization even though both sufferers compare their experience to that of a dream. Psychometric tests produce little evidence of a relationship between clouding of consciousness and depersonalization. The thought process abnormalities in clouding of consciousness can range in severity from a sluggishness of thought processes and a mild difficulty to direct thoughts at will to a complete inability to think coherently. This can be confused with the formal thought disorder seen in schizophrenia. The fundamental difference is that clouded patients usually are aware of their incoherence and complain of being “confused”, “unable to think straight”, or “unable to get it together” whereas schizophrenic patients seem little concerned about and oblivious to their incoherence.

Alternative medicine practitioners popularly use the term brain fog. Some skeptics of alternative medicine say that "it is not clear what the phrase represents", referring to a writer describing bouts of "brain fog" after getting Lyme disease. Conventional medicine recognizes that a characteristic presentation of Lyme disease is clouding of consciousness, which is, of course, also known as mental fog. Perhaps the difference between the word "brain" and the word "mental" is trivial. In alternative medicine, the word "fog" is often confused with the term "fag", which is believed to be an abbreviation for fatigue. Brain fag is a culture-bound syndrome characterized by complaints of the brain being "fatigued" and is not the same thing as brain fog or clouding of consciousness.