Alzheimer’s disease is the most common cause of dementia and accounts for ~55% of all cases of dementia. One to two percent of the population at age 65 will have dementia and the prevalence increases by 15-25% each decade. The neuro-pathological changes in Alzheimer’s disease are due to two main processes. First of all, there…
Vascular dementia is the second most common cause of dementia and accounts for approximately 10% of all dementias in developed countries. The incidence of vascular dementia increases with age and are associated with common cardiovascular risk factors (hypertension, diabetes, dyslipidaemia etc.). Patients often present with a sudden, stepwise, neurological deterioration and there may be other…
Frontotemporal dementia is the most common cause of dementia in patients under the age of 65. There are three different subtypes: 1) behavioural-variant frontotemporal dementia,the most common subtype which is characterised by changes in personality and social conduct; 2) progressive nonfluent aphasia – a disorder of language output that may occur in the absence of…
Dementia with Lewy bodies is the second most common neurodegenerative dementia after Alzheimer’s disease, accounting for 15-20% of all cases. This form of dementia is due to an abnormal accumulation of Lewy bodies, which are spherical intra-neuronal protein aggregates consisting primarily of α-synuclein. Dementia with Lewy bodies is therefore considered as a synucleinopathy. Other synucleinopathies…
The Parkinson-plus syndromes include 1) multi-system atrophy, 2) progressive supra-nuclear palsy and 3) corticobasal degeneration. Multi-system atrophy Multi-system atrophy (MSA) is a rare adult-onset sporadic neurodegenerative disorder. There are two main subtypes, as identified by its dominating symptomatology. MSA-P is when parkinsonian symptoms predominate, and MSA-C if cerebellar symptoms dominate. These two terms have replaced…