A sign of dementia that you can see by looking in the mirror

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Mirror agnosia can signal damage to the parietal lobe of the brain, the report says.

As dementia progresses, patients often lose their independence due to debilitating confusion. Sometimes agnosia causes disorientation, which disrupts the patient's perception of people and objects. Misidentification of reflected images of oneself is another well-known feature of agnosia, which is medically called mirror agnosia.

It is often described in the medical literature in patients who have suffered a stroke or neurodegenerative disease.

Agnosia describes a rare disorder characterized by the inability to process sensory information from objects or people. People with agnosia may have difficulty “recognizing the geometric features of an object or person,” regardless of how familiar they are.

The condition may be limited to a single sensory modality, such as vision or hearing, causing difficulty recognizing an object as a cup or identifying a sound as a cough. However, all five senses can be impaired.

The medical report of a 62-year-old patient with Alzheimer's disease states that she performed well on all face recognition tests except those involving her own reflected image.

“She did not recognize her reflection in the mirror, but instead thought of it as a living person who did not speak. She repeatedly asked the person's name and finally stated, 'Here is a woman who does not know her own name.'”