My dad has vascular dementia and in the last year he went down hill fast he didnt know where he was he got winded just walking a few feet. we really thought he might die with in six months and then all of a sudden he got better I mean really better his breathing was better and his memory got better and he dosent beleive us when we told him he was really sick. can these symptoms come and go?
If your father had been suffering from pulmonary oedema as a result of heart disease, that would explain the breathlessness on exertion and also his confusion - which would be not exactly caused by vascular dementia, but by oxygen deprivation (they're closely associated, but vascular dementia is permanent whereas low oxygen can be corrected, as Pam points out). A change in the dose or type of his diuretic so that it suddenly started working would have seemed like a miracle cure - with diuretics, as the dose gets stepped up, you don't see a gradual improvement; it goes "nothing, nothing, nothing - oh yeah! That's cracked it!" Similarly, my mother was switched from furosemide, which had stopped working well, to bumetanide and the results were amazing.
In any case, I hope that your father's health continues stable for a good while yet. Enjoy having him back!
Her cognition took a sharp decline with the heart failure. Now she will have episodes during the day where she gets confused. She'll be fine and know who I am and then in the middle of the day she won't remember who I am or where she is. She will say I'm her sister and that she is living in a house with her parents and siblings from 90 years ago. Then later that night she'll correctly identify me and where she is living. There does not seem to be any rhythm or reason to these lapses in memory.
I monitor her pO2 saturation and there is no change during the day. Can dementia come and go during the day? If so, what might cause it?