Atypical Presentations of Alzheimer’s Disease: Beyond Amnestic Dementia

Author Info

Ioanna Tsantzali Panagiotis G. Paraskevas Sotirios G. Paraskevas Spiros Efthimiopoulos Georgios Tsivgoulis George P. Paraskevas

Corresponding Author

George P. Paraskevas
2nd Department of Neurology, School of Medicine, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, “Attikon” General University Hospital, Athens, Greece

A B S T R A C T

Neuropathological and biomarker-based studies indicate that Alzheimer’s disease may sometimes present not with the typical amnestic dementia syndrome of the hippocampal type but with atypical clinical pictures. Atypical presentations include frontal dementia sometimes with additional behavioural component mimicking frontotemporal dementia, logopenic primary progressive aphasia and posterior cortical atrophy, while mixed presentations include patients with additional vascular or Lewy body pathology. More atypical presentations include non-logopenic (semantic, non-fluent agrammatic and unclassifiable) primary progressive aphasia, corticobasal syndrome and cases mixed with normal pressure hydrocephalus. Atypical clinical presentations of Alzheimer’s disease may be more common than previously thought. Cerebrospinal fluid levels of biomarkers such as amyloid beta peptide, hyperphosphorylated tau protein and total tau protein, may offer a useful tool for correct ante mortem identification of such patients, which is likely to affect therapeutic decisions.

Article Info

Article Type

Review Article

Publication history

Received: Thu 12, Nov 2020
Accepted: Mon 23, Nov 2020
Published: Fri 04, Dec 2020

Copyright

© 2023 George P. Paraskevas. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Hosting by Science Repository.
DOI: 10.31487/j.CEI.2020.03.03