All that follows [except for my comments in brackets] is from Reference (3) below:
The diagnosis of dementia due to Alzheimer’s disease: recommendations from the National Institute on Aging-Alzheimer’s Association workgroups on diagnostic guidelines for Alzheimer’s disease. [PubMed Abstract] [Full Text HTML] [Full Text PDF]. Alzheimers Dement. 2011 May;7(3):263-9. doi: 10.1016/j.jalz.2011.03.005. Epub 2011 Apr 21.
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2. Criteria for all-cause dementia
4. Probable AD dementia: Core clinical criteria
5.2. Etiologically mixed presentation
6. [Biomarkers] Probable AD dementia with evidence of the AD pathophysiological process
8. Considerations related to the incorporation of biomarkers into AD dementia criteria
10. Dementia unlikely to be due to AD Resources
In this stage, impairments in memory, thinking and behavior decrease a person’s ability to function independently in everyday life. This guideline updates and clarifies clinical criteria to diagnose dementia from all causes and specifically from Alzheimer’s disease. These criteria are sufficiently broad and flexible to be used now both by community practitioners without access to neuropsychological testing, specialized brain imaging, or CSF testing and by specialists engaged in research or clinical studies who have access to such tools. In the future, biomarker evidence may provide additional diagnostic certainty, but much more research is needed to identify the most accurate biomarkers and confirm their usefulness. (1)
2. Criteria for all-cause dementia: Core clinical criteriaIn this section, we outline core clinical criteria to be used in all clinical settings. Because there are many causes of dementia, we will first outline the criteria for all-cause dementia.
The diagnosis of dementia is intended to encompass the spectrum of severity, ranging from the mildest to the most severe stages of dementia. The methodology for staging of dementia severity was beyond the charge of the workgroup. Dementia is diagnosed when there are cognitive or behavioral (neuropsychiatric) symptoms that:
1. Interfere with the ability to function at work or at usual activities; and
2. Represent a decline from previous levels of functioning and performing; and
3. Are not explained by delirium or major psychiatric disorder;
4. Cognitive impairment is detected and diagnosed through a combination of (1) history-taking from the patient and a knowledgeable informant and (2) an objective cognitive assessment, either a “bedside” mental status examination or neuropsychological testing. Neuropsychological testing should be performed when the routine history and bedside mental status examination cannot provide a confident diagnosis.
5. The cognitive or behavioral impairment involves a minimum of two of the following domains:
a. Impaired ability to acquire and remember new information—symptoms include: repetitive questions or conversations, misplacing personal belongings, forgetting events or appointments, getting lost on a familiar route.
b. Impaired reasoning and handling of complex tasks, poor judgment— symptoms include: poor understanding of safety risks, inability to manage finances, poor decision-making ability, inability to plan complex or sequential activities.
c. Impaired visuospatial abilities—symptoms include: inability to recognize faces or common objects or to find objects in direct view despite good acuity, inability to operate simple implements, or orient clothing to the body.
d. Impaired language functions (speaking, reading, writing)—symptoms include: difficulty thinking of common words while speaking, hesitations; speech, spelling, and writing errors.
e. Changes in personality, behavior, or comportment—symptoms include: uncharacteristic mood fluctuations such as agitation, impaired motivation, initiative, apathy, loss of drive, social withdrawal, decreased interest in previous activities, loss of empathy, compulsive or obsessive behaviors, socially unacceptable behaviors.
The differentiation of dementia from MCI (see companion article [5] on the diagnosis of MCI) rests on the determination of whether or not there is significant interference in the ability to function at work or in usual daily activities. This is inherently a clinical judgment made by a skilled clinician on the basis of the individual circumstances of the patient and the description of daily affairs of the patient obtained from the patient and from a knowledgeable informant.
3. Proposed classification criteria for AD dementia
We propose the following terminology for classifying individuals with dementia caused by AD: (1) Probable AD dementia, (2) Possible AD dementia, and (3) Probable or possible AD dementia with evidence of the AD pathophysiological process. The first two are intended for use in all clinical settings. The third is currently intended for research purposes.
4. Probable AD dementia: Core clinical criteria4.1. Probable AD dementia is diagnosed when the patient
1. Meets criteria for dementia described earlier in the text, and in addition, has the following characteristics:
A. Insidious onset. Symptoms have a gradual onset over months to years, not sudden over hours or days;
B. Clear-cut history of worsening of cognition by report or observation; and
C. The initial and most prominent cognitive deficits are evident on history and examination in one of the following categories.
a. Amnestic presentation: It is the most common syndromic presentation of AD dementia. The deficits should include impairment in learning and recall of recently learned information. There should also be evidence of cognitive dysfunction in at least one other cognitive domain, as defined earlier in the text.
b. Nonamnestic presentations:
• Language presentation: The most prominent deficits are in word-finding, but deficits in other cognitive domains should be present.
• Visuospatial presentation: The most prominent deficits are in spatial cognition, including object agnosia, impaired face recognition, simultanagnosia, and alexia. Deficits in other cognitive domains should be present.
• Executive dysfunction: The most prominent deficits are impaired reasoning, judgment, and problem solving. Deficits in other cognitive domains should be present.
D. The diagnosis of probable AD dementia should not be applied when there is evidence of (a) substantial concomitant cerebrovascular disease, defined by a history of a stroke temporally related to the onset or worsening of cognitive impairment; or the presence of multiple or extensive infarcts or severe white matter hyperintensity burden; or (b) core features of Dementia with Lewy bodies other than dementia itself; or (c) prominent features of behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia; or (d) prominent features of semantic variant primary progressive aphasia or nonfluent/ agrammatic variant primary progressive aphasia; or (e) evidence for another concurrent, active neurological disease, or a non-neurological medical comorbidity or use of medication that could have a substantial effect on cognition.
5.2. Etiologically mixed presentation
Etiologically mixed presentation meets all core clinical criteria for AD dementia but has evidence of (a) concomitant cerebrovascular disease, defined by a history of stroke temporally related to the onset or worsening of cognitive impairment; or the presence of multiple or extensive infarcts or severe white matter hyperintensity burden; or (b) features of Dementia with Lewy bodies other than the dementia itself; or (c) evidence for another neurological disease or a non-neurological medical comorbidity or medication use that could have a substantial effect on cognition Note: A diagnosis of “possible AD” by the 1984 NINCDS-ADRDA criteria [1] would not necessarily meet the current criteria for possible AD dementia. Such a patient would need to be re-evaluated.
6. Probable AD dementia with evidence of the AD pathophysiological process
The rationale for including biomarkers for the pathophysiological process of AD in the diagnostic criteria is summarized in the Introduction to this series of articles [2], The major AD biomarkers that have been widely investigated at this time (see [21] for review) may be broken into two classes based on the biology which they measure. Biomarkers of brain amyloid-beta (Aβ) protein deposition are low CSF Aβ42 and positive PET amyloid imaging [22,23]. The second category is that of biomarkers of downstream neuronal degeneration or injury. The three major bio-markers in this category are elevated CSF tau, both total tau and phosphorylated tau (p-tau); decreased 18fluorodeoxyglucose (FDG) uptake on PET in temporo–parietal cortex; and disproportionate atrophy on structural magnetic resonance imaging in medial, basal, and lateral temporal lobe, and medial parietal cortex. Total tau and p-tau are treated equivalently in this study, although p-tau may have more specificity for AD than other dementing diseases.
In persons who meet the core clinical Criteria for probable AD dementia biomarker evidence may increase the certainty that the basis of the clinical dementia syndrome is the AD pathophysiological process. However, we do not advocate the use of AD biomarker tests for routine diagnostic purposes at the present time. There are several reasons for this limitation: (1) the core clinical criteria provide very good diagnostic accuracy and utility in most patients; (2) more research needs to be done to ensure that criteria that include the use of biomarkers have been appropriately designed, (3) there is limited standardization of biomarkers from one locale to another, and (4) access to biomarkers is limited to varying degrees in community settings. Presently, the use of biomarkers to enhance certainty of AD pathophysiological process may be useful in three circumstances: investigational studies, clinical trials, and as optional clinical tools for use where available and when deemed appropriate by the clinician.
Biomarker test results can fall into three categories–clearly positive, clearly negative, and indeterminate. We envision that application of biomarkers for the AD pathophysiological process would operate as outlined in the Table 1.
8. Considerations related to the incorporation of biomarkers into AD dementia criteria
As described in the two companion articles on the preclinical [4] and MCI [5] phases of the AD pathophysiological process, AD dementia is part of a continuum of clinical and biological phenomena. AD dementia is fundamentally a clinical diagnosis. To make a diagnosis of AD dementia with biomarker support, the core clinical diagnosis of AD dementia must first be satisfied. According to their nature, CSF biomarkers rely on a quantitative interpretation in comparison with normative standards. Imaging biomarkers can be interpreted in both a qualitative or quantitative manner. In many cases, biomarker results will be clearly normal or abnormal. In these cases, a qualitative interpretation of a biomarker test will unequivocally identify “positive” findings that imply the presence of the underlying AD pathophysiological process, or negative findings that unequivocally imply absence of an AD pathophysiological process. However, in some cases, ambiguous or indeterminate results will be obtained. This is inevitable given that all biomarkers are continuous measures, and the diagnostic labels of “positive” or “negative” require that cutoff values be applied to continuous biological phenomena. Although sophisticated quantitative and objective image analysis methods do exist, at present, accepted standards for quantitative analysis of AD imaging tests are lacking. Standard clinical practice in diagnostic imaging is qualitative in nature. Therefore, quantification of imaging biomarkers must rely on local laboratory specific standards. The same holds true for CSF biomarkers, although standardization efforts are more advanced for CSF biomarkers than for the imaging tests. Quantitative analytic techniques are, and will continue to be in evolution for some time. Therefore, practical use of biomarkers must follow best-practice guidelines within laboratory-specific contexts, until standardization has been fully accomplished. A sequence of events has been described with Aβ pathophysiological processes becoming abnormal first and downstream neuronal injury biomarkers becoming abnormal later [6,7], This might imply a hierarchical ranking of Aβ biomarkers over downstream neuronal injury biomarkers for diagnostic purposes. However, at this time, the reliability of such a hierarchical scheme has not been sufficiently well established for use in AD dementia. Given the number of different AD biomarkers, it is inevitable that different combinations of test results can occur. For example, individual cases might be encountered with a positive Aβ and negative neuronal injury biomarker, or a positive FDG PET and negative tau measure, and so on. At present, the data are insufficient to recommend a scheme that arbitrates among all different biomarker combinations. Further studies are needed to prioritize biomarkers and to determine their value and validity in practice and research settings.
10. Dementia unlikely to be due to AD
1. Does not meet clinical criteria for AD dementia.
2. a. Regardless of meeting clinical criteria for probable or possible AD dementia, there is sufficient evidence for an alternative diagnosis such as HIV dementia, dementia of Huntington’s disease, or others that rarely, if ever, overlap with AD. b. Regardless of meeting clinical criteria for possible AD dementia, both Aβ and neuronal injury biomarkers are negative (see section 6, earlier in the text).
(1) New Diagnostic Criteria and Guidelines for Alzheimer’s Disease from the Alheimer’s Association.
(2) Introduction to the recommendations from the National Institute on Aging-Alzheimer’s Association workgroups on diagnostic guidelines for Alzheimer’s disease. [PubMed Abstract] [Full Text HTML] [Full Text PDF]. Alzheimers Dement. 2011 May;7(3):257-62. doi: 10.1016/j.jalz.2011.03.004. Epub 2011 Apr 21.
(3) The diagnosis of dementia due to Alzheimer’s disease: recommendations from the National Institute on Aging-Alzheimer’s Association workgroups on diagnostic guidelines for Alzheimer’s disease. [PubMed Abstract] [Full Text HTML] [Full Text PDF]. Alzheimers Dement. 2011 May;7(3):263-9. doi: 10.1016/j.jalz.2011.03.005. Epub 2011 Apr 21.
(4) The diagnosis of mild cognitive impairment due to Alzheimer’s disease: Recommendations from the National Institute on Aging-Alzheimer’s Association workgroups on diagnostic guidelines for Alzheimer’s disease. [PubMed Abstract] [Full Text HTML] [Full Text PDF] Alzheimers Dement. 2011 May;7(3):270-9. doi: 10.1016/j.jalz.2011.03.008. Epub 2011 Apr 21.
(5) Toward defining the preclinical stages of Alzheimer’s disease: Recommendations from the National Institute on Aging-Alzheimer’s Association workgroups on diagnostic guidelines for Alzheimer’s disease. [PubMed Abstract] [Full Text HTML] [Full Text PDF] Alzheimers Dement. 2011 May;7(3):280-92. doi: 10.1016/j.jalz.2011.03.003. Epub 2011 Apr 21.
(6) The SPRINT Memory and cognition IN Decreased hypertension (SPRINT-MIND) Trial
