Alzheimer's disease: clinical Features

Abstract

The last decade of clinical dementia research has led to the development of standardized criteria for the diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease (AD) and to the rediscovery of ‘non-cognitive’ features of AD. This review will discuss some of the diagnostic problems caused by the lack of reliable diagnostic markers and by the heterogeneity of AD's clinical manifestations, and it will focus on the ‘non-cognitive’ features which are responsible for a large part of the clinical diversity of AD: hallucinations, delusions, delusional misidentifications, depressive symptoms, behavioural disturbance and neurological disorders. These features are of particular interest, because they may aggravate cognitive impairment, influence the course of illness, increase the patients' and their families' stress, and because some of them may be accessible to treatment