Early stage memory impairment, visual hallucinations, and myoclonus combined with temporal lobe atrophy predict Alzheimer’s disease pathology in corticobasal syndrome

ABSTRACT

Corticobasal syndrome (CBS) is a typical phenotype of corticobasal degeneration (CBD). However, autopsy series have shown that many CBS cases emerge from various types of non-CBD pathology. We report a 73-year-old Korean man who was clinically diagnosed with CBS whose underlying pathology was Alzheimer’s disease (AD) at autopsy (CBS-AD). This case suggests that early developing memory impairment and myoclonus, severe temporoparietal atrophy, and visual hallucinations may support a more specific prediction of CBS-AD.

KEYWORDS:

• Corticobasal syndrome
• corticobasal degeneration
• Alzheimer’s disease pathology
• myoclonus
• visual hallucination
• atypical Alzheimer’s dementia

Acknowledgments

We thank our patient and his family for donating the brain to the Pusan National University Hospital Brain Bank to contribute to dementia research. We are grateful to Peter Davies, Feinstein Institute for Medical Research, North Shore-Long Island Jewish Health Care System, who provided CP-13 antibody.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Original Technology Research Program for Brain Science through the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) funded by the Korean government (MSIP) [No. 2014M3C7A1064752] and a clinical research grant from Pusan National University Hospital in 2016.