Recent Clinical-Pathologic Research on the Causes of Dementia in Late Life: Update From the Honolulu-Asia Aging Study

Abstract

In this study, we compare neuropathological findings at autopsy with clinical dementia diagnoses, such as Alzheimer’s disease and vascular dementia. Participants consisted of 363 aged Japanese-American men from the Honolulu-Asia Aging Study. Results indicated that the correspondence between clinical and neuropathologic diagnosis was not great, with 56% of patients diagnosed with probable or possible Alzheimer’s disease during life but with only 19% having neuritic plaques and/or neurofibrillary tangles as the sole or dominant dementia-related lesions in the brain at autopsy. Although 16% of cases were attributed to mixed causes during life, almost 40% were found to have significant mixtures of dementia-related lesions at autopsy. Finally, both Alzheimer’s disease and non-Alzheimer’s disease neuropathologic lesions contributed independently to the explanation of variance on a test of overall cognitive performance. The results suggest that clinical diagnosis of dementia made during life may fail to reflect the pathogenic complexity of this condition in very elderly persons.