Auguste D and Alzheimer's disease.

On Nov 4, 1906, Alois Alzheimer gave a remarkable lecture, in which he described for the first time a form of dementia that subsequently, at the suggestion of Emil Kraepelin, became known as Alzheimer’s disease. In his lecture, at the 37th Conference of South-West German Psychiatrists in Tübingen, Alzheimer described a patient called Auguste D, a 51-year-old woman from Frankfurt who had shown progressive cognitive impairment, focal symptoms, hallucinations, delusions, and psychosocial incompetence. At necropsy, there were plaques, neurofibrillary tangles, and arteriosclerotic changes. The eponym Alzheimer, originally used to refer to presenile dementia, came into later use for the largest cause of primary dementia—senile dementia of the Alzheimer type (SDAT). Here, we describe the discovery and contents of the file of Auguste D, which had not been seen since 1909.