Presenile Dementia of the Jakob Type

Abstract

The term presenile dementia is generally applied to "primary" psychoses occurring in the presenium and characterized by intellectual deterioration structural ("organic") in type. The causation of these diseases is unknown. However, because of the age of the patients, it is usually assumed that senescence plays some, still obscure, etiologic role.¹ Two broad groups of presenile dementias may be recognized: The first includes Alzheimer's and Pick's disease, two well-established clinicopathological entities; the second comprises a small number of still ill-defined conditions variously associated with names of investigators, such as Jakob,* Creutzfeldt,⁴ Heidenhain,⁵ Kraepelin,⁶ and others. Curiously enough, the latter group has received scanty attention in the American literature; the purpose of this presentation is to contribute to its study by reporting and discussing the clinical and pathologic findings of two cases. Pertinent clinical and pathological data on similar patients published in the literature were evaluated in the