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KMID : 1225120100020010018
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Vascular Neurology
2010 Volume.2 No. 1 p.18 ~ p.25
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The General Features of Alzheimer’s Disease and Vascular Dementia
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Choi Hee-Seung
Kim Gyung-Whan
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Abstract
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Background: As the number of elderly people increases, dementia is a speedily growing public health concern. Although many efforts have been tried to detect most likely ongoing dementia from mild cognitive impairmentstage and to differentiate betweenAlzheimer’s disease (AD) and vascular dementia (VaD), it still remains unclear. Moreover the concept of VaD is based on the one of AD defined by mainly memory impairment as a primary criterion. So we reviewed precedent articles whether the features of neuropsychological dysfunction is discriminative between AD and VaD, and what controversial questions between two types of dementia are.
Summary: Numerous studies have showed that AD is associated with more memory difficulty and VaD is more deficits in executive functions. Most subjects with VaD are usually able to respond to cues and have superior free recall and relatively inferior deficits of verbal long-term memory. In addition, general cognitive status in VaD patients with white matter changes was worse than those of patients without white matter changes group. Frontal lobe functions such as fluency, attention, and visuo-constructive function were especially affected by white matter changes. However, many reports which is failed to find differences in these and other aspects of cognitive functiong have also existed.
Conclusions: The majority of patients with dementia in elderly subjects suffer from a complex of neurodegenerative and vascular change. So attempting to divide the dementia disorder dichotomously intoAD and vascular cognitive impairment may be improper and may fail to catch the search for important mechanisms.
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KEYWORD
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Alzheimer’s disease, Vascular dementia, Cognitive deficits, Differential diagnosis
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