BACKGROUND Diagnostic criteria for dementia with Lewy bodies (DLB) are still evolving. No data exist on prospective differentiation of DLB and Alzheimer disease (AD). OBJECTIVE To examine the clinician's diagnostic accuracy for DLB and analyze factors contributing to false-positive DLB diagnoses. METHODS A prospective series of 10 patients with clinically diagnosed DLB who came to autopsy w...

The presynaptic protein a-synuclein is a prime suspect for contributing to Lewy pathology and clinical aspects of diseases, including Parkinson’s disease, dementia with Lewy bodies, and a Lewy body variant of Alzheimer’s disease. a-Synuclein accumulates in Lewy bodies and Lewy neurites, and two missense mutations (A53T and A30P) in the a-synuclein gene are genetically linked to rare familial fo...

BACKGROUND Olfactory abnormalities are reported in Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's disease. Anosmia appears to be common in dementia with Lewy bodies but not in pure Alzheimer's disease. OBJECTIVE To determine whether anosmia improves discrimination between the Lewy body variant (LBV) of Alzheimer's disease and "pure" Alzheimer's disease. METHODS 106 cases of necropsy confirmed pure Alz...

BACKGROUND Dementia with Lewy bodies (DLB) and Parkinson's disease dementia (PDD), which share many clinical, neurochemical, and morphological features, have been incorporated into DSM-5 as two separate entities of major neurocognitive disorders with Lewy bodies. Despite clinical overlap, their diagnosis is based on an arbitrary distinction concerning the time of onset of motor and cognitive sy...

BACKGROUND Few patients are reported with dementia with Lewy bodies before fifty years-old, which may partly reflect the difficulty of accurate diagnosis in young population. We report the case of a 44-year-old male with pathologically confirmed sporadic dementia with Lewy bodies, who did not fulfil the revised clinical criteria for this disease. CASE PRESENTATION We document this atypical ca...