Bridging Multiple Dementias

Vascular and other dementias

The non-Alzheimer dementias are a heterogeneous group of disorders, accounting for approximately a third of all dementias. Many dementias have familial forms and molecular techniques have identified the gene mutations responsible for Alzheimer’s disease, Huntington’s disease, familial Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease and a form of vascular dementia. These genetic defects lie at the start of pathologic...

Genetics of the dementias.

While the majority of dementias are sporadic, many diseases causing dementia can also occur on a familial basis. Some of these show an autosomal or sex linked inheritance. In others, certain genes are not directly causative, but are major risk factors. Some dementias may be definitively diagnosed in vivo or prenatally using genetic testing. The discovery of causative genes has also led to the d...

The dementias of schizophrenia

Cases of "adolescent insanity" were known to Kraepelin's forerunners and lay at the core of his concept of dementia præcox. In the post-neuroleptic era it became clear that dementia may also occur in schizophrenia as a fully reversible state depending on psychopathological status. In the present review we discuss the validity of applying the concept of dementia to schizophrenia. We concur with ...

Neuroimaging of dementias.

Frontal-Subcortical Dementias

Whereas Alzheimer’s disease (AD), the most common form of dementing illness, is typically characterized by initial deterioration within limbic and reticular structures (hippocampal/ entorhinal regions and basal forebrain cholinergic systems) with later involvement of the neocortex (particularly in temporal and parietal cortices), a second and diverse group of dementias do not initially present ...