Vascular dementia: dead or alive?

Vascular Dementia and Alzheimer's Disease: The Unsolved Problem of Clinical and Neuropsychological Differential Diagnosis

“…The present results confirm previous neuropsychological studies (Almkvist et al, 1993;Rao & Howard, 1998) that already found no significant detectable differences between VaD and AD.…”

“…Indeed, other prior studies have failed to identify significant differences in these cognitive domains between VaD and AD patients (Almkvist et al, 1993;Rao & Howard, 1998). A recent neuropsychological study (Traykov et al, 2002) comparing two groups of patients affected by VaD and AD concluded that there were differences especially related to the executive functions, the latter markedly impaired in VaD as compared to AD, whose language function and non-verbal memory resulted, on the opposite, as more significantly damaged.…”

The Use of Statistical Parametric Mapping (SPM96) as a Decision Aid in the Differential Diagnosis of Dementia Using 99mTc‐HMPAO SPECT

“…Reviews in the literature [9,25,41] highlight the difficulties of diagnosing vascular dementia clinically and Erkinjuntti 1997 [9] states that the main challenge is to diagnose correctly combined cases with both vascular and Alzheimer-type pathology. Most importantly, Rao and Howard [41] raise the difficulty of attributing causality and advocate defining a syndrome of global cognitive impairment associated with specific risk factors. No single feature of cerebrovascular disease is predictive of dementia and instead there appears to be a critical threshold related to the burden of the disease above which reduced cognitive function occurs [35].…”

Neuroprotective effect of modified Wu-Zi-Yan-Zong granule, a traditional Chinese herbal medicine, on CoCl2-induced PC12 cells

“…Recent researches reveal that hypoxic/ischemic neurological damage induced by aging is an important risk factor and actively involved in the pathogenesis of SD (Rao and Howard, 1998;Martin et al, 2008). Along with aging, chronic cerebral hypoxia or ischemia usually induces progressive neuronal cells death and further leads to amnesia and memory deterioration.…”