The Alzheimer variant of Lewy body disease: A pathologically confirmed case-control study

The objective of the study was to identify clinical features that
distinguish patients with dementia with Lewy bodies (DLB), who were
classified as Alzheimer's disease ( AD) patients, from patients
with AD. We examined a group of 27 patients from our memory clinic,
originally diagnosed with AD, of whom 6 were postmortem found to
have DLB. For the present study, we compared cognitive,
noncognitive and neurological symptoms between the two groups. We
found that there were no differences on ratings of dementia and
scales for activities of daily living. Patients with DLB performed
better on the MMSE and the memory subtest of the CAMCOG, but there
was no difference in any other cognitive domain. Furthermore,
genetic risk factors, including family history of dementia or
allele frequency of the apolipoprotein epsilon 4, did not
discriminate between the two groups, and there were no differences
on CCT scans. Taken together, our findings suggest that Lewy body
pathology may be present in patients who do not show the typical
clinical features which distinguish DLB from AD. Copyright (C) 2005
S. Karger AG, Basel.