Recommendation for and comparison of three types of dementia: Alzheimer’s disease, subcortical ischemic vascular dementia, and mixed dementia

Abstract

With the progress in global demography of aging, dementia has become a great world health-care issue that require urgent attention and settlement. Dementia can arise from a variety of factors, such as neuronal degeneration for Alzheimer’s disease (AD), vascular risk factors and multiple infarcts for vascular dementia (VaD), and both degeneration and vascular factors for mixed dementia (MD). Pathophysiology of AD includes the amyloid and tau protein hypothesis, and inflammation-related mechanisms are also widespread mentioned. Subcortical ischemic vascular dementia (SIVD), a subtype of VaD, is commonly caused by complete or incomplete lacunar infarction of VaD pathology. MD involves both degeneration and vascular factors, and the interaction between the two results in the complication of the pathological mechanism and clinical phenotype. The clinical manifestations of AD are often divided into four stages according to the progress of the disease, while the phenotypes of SIVD usually has two categories. As for MD, the phenotypes are complex and diverse. Several clinical studies showed that its symptoms and signs are more similar to SIVD than AD. This article aims to analyze and compare the different aspects of the three kinds of dementia.

Keywords

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) / subcortical ischemic vascular dementia (SIVD) / mixed dementia (MD) / pathophysiology / clinical feature