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Parkinson's disease with dementia and dementia with Lewy body disease: two syndromes, the same disease?
Author(s) -
SELLAL François
Publication year - 2006
Publication title -
psychogeriatrics
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.647
H-Index - 32
eISSN - 1479-8301
pISSN - 1346-3500
DOI - 10.1111/j.1479-8301.2006.00132.x
Subject(s) - dementia with lewy bodies , dementia , disease , lewy body , pathological , parkinson's disease , medicine , cognition , neuroscience , pathology , pathogenesis , alpha synuclein , psychology , psychiatry
ABSTRACT The diagnosis of Parkinson's disease with dementia (PDD) or dementia with Lewy bodies (DLB) relies on an arbitrary distinction between the time of onset of motor and cognitive symptoms. These syndromes share many clinical, genetic and neurobiological similarities. From a pathological point of view, both conditions are associated to Lewy bodies (LB), but the exact role of LB is not straightforward. Their presence in some brain areas is not always well correlated to clinical symptoms. The process by which they are associated, directly or otherwise, to neuronal damage and synaptic loss remains to be elucidated. Moreover Alzheimer's disease pathology is more frequent and more closely related to cognitive disorders in DLB than in PDD, but the mechanisms linking LB to beta‐amyloid pathology are unknown. Longitudinal studies will be necessary to determine the pathogenesis underlying clinical symptoms of PDD and DLB. However, it is probable that in a near future PDD and DLB will be recognized as the same disease with two different courses.