Original articlesRegional cerebral metabolism in early Alzheimer’s disease with clinically significant apathy or depression
Section snippets
Patients
A total of 155 patients older than 55 years and complaining of memory deficits were referred to the memory disorder clinics of two centers participating in a prospective multicenter European study (NEST-DD, Dresden and Cologne). Patients were eligible for study participation in NEST-DD if the Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE) (Folstein et al 1975) revealed a minimum score of 20 points; the score obtained in the Clinical Dementia Rating Scale (CDR) (Morris 1993) did not exceed 2; and if
Results
Principle demographic and clinical data are given in Table 1. The rather high educational level of the patient group under study (12.2 years on average and a range from 8 to 18 years) may be attributed to the fact that both centers are university hospitals. The majority of subjects were newly diagnosed AD patients. Of the 53 patients, only 19 patients therefore received medication for dementia and only 1 patient received psychotropic medication. The time since onset of symptoms (duration of
Discussion
The aim of the study was to identify brain areas implicated in behavioral disturbances in early AD. Noncognitive symptoms have been shown to fluctuate (Hope et al 1999; Levy et al 1996a) and to steadily become more frequent throughout progression of the disease (Levy et al 1996a; Lopez et al 2003; Lyketsos et al 2001a; Mega et al 1996; Tractenberg et al 2000), but overall no comprehensive etiological and pathophysiological picture seems to emerge. It has been suggested that this lack of clarity
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