Multiple pathologies in dementia : correlations with clinical diagnoses

The research focused on patients with dementia for whom the cognitive impairment interfered with their daily life. Dementia was studied from a neuropathological point of view. The materials used for this research were brains of deceased patients with dementia. According to the predominant pathology found, different subtypes of dementia (Alzheimer´s disease, vascular dementia, Lewy bodies dementia and others) could be classified. The main aim of the research was to establish a correlation between the clinical picture of the patient and the neuropathological post-mortem findings in the brain. A high prevalence of comorbidity of different pathologies was found. This questions the current traditional nosological classification, in which the predominant pathology is considered to be the most important and suggest a new multidimentional approach of dementia. In this new approach dementia is considered to be a syndrome constituted by a spectrum of symptoms and neuropathological findings.