Are Parkinson's Disease with dementia and Dementia with lewy Bodies the Same Entity? Published by:

Dementias associated with cortical Lewy bodies are tra-ditionally classified as dementia with Lewy bodies (DLB), characterized by parkinsonism, visual hallucina-tions and cognitive fluctuations,1 or Parkinson’s disease with dementia (PDD). Overall, DLB accounts for about 20 % of late-onset dementia cases,1 and dementia devel-ops in the majority of cases with a diagnosis of PD.2 As outlined below, there are clinical and neurobiological similarities between DLB and PDD patients. The dis-tinction between the conditions as operationally defined within the standardized clinical criteria depends entire-ly on the duration of parkinsonism prior to dementia. The consensus criteria for a clinical diagnosis of DLB state that a diagnosis cannot be made if parkinsonian symptoms developed more than 1 year before the onse