Affiliations: [a] Department of Pathology, University of Kansas Medical Center, Kansas City, KS, USA | [b] Department of Pathology, University of California, Irvine, Medical Center, CA, USA | [c] Alzheimer's Disease Research Center, University of California, Irvine, CA, USA
Correspondence:
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Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, University of Kansas Medical Center, 3901 Rainbow Blvd, Kansas City, Kansas 66160-7410, USA. Tel.: +1 913 588 7268; Fax: +1 913 588 7073; E-mail: ksantacruz@kumc.edu.
Abstract: In order to study the clinical overlap between neuropathologically defined Lewy body disease (LBD) and Alzheimer's disease, we examined the brains of 37 demented and 13 non-demented subjects. Nigral Lewy bodies (LBs) were present in 16/37 dementia patients, 13 of which had LBD. Eight of these 13 were clinically indistinguishable from AD patients, and in these cases isocortical neurofibrillary tangle (NFT) formation was rare. Thus, although the two conditions were clinically similar in this series, LBD could be distinguished from AD pathologically not only by the presence of nigral LBs but also by the relative paucity of isocortical NFTs.
