The takeaway: Lewy body dementia accounts for up to 20% of dementia cases and is closely related to Parkinson’s disease due to the buildup of a protein in neurons in the brain. It can be difficult to diagnose, but new tests and approaches, combined with new drugs, are improving treatment and care. A neurologist recommends seeking help if you are having trouble with thinking and memory to identify the specific cause.
Getting to the bottom of dementia symptoms for an accurate diagnosis takes a particular kind of detective.
Enter Samantha Holden, MD, associate professor of neurology, cognitive and movement disorders neurologist and director of the Lewy Body Dementia Association Research Center of Excellence at CU Anschutz.
“Dementia is a general, umbrella term that is defined by a decline in a person’s thinking and memory that is abnormal for that individual, affecting their daily independence and day-to-day life. It can't be a baseline impairment or a cognitive disability. Under that umbrella of dementia, there's probably dozens of different causes.”
But identifying those impairments and their causes is often a puzzle, one that gets more complex when discussing dementia with Lewy bodies – caused by a buildup of a particular protein in neurons – that can have symptoms both typical of dementia and Parkinson’s disease.
“Patients that have what we would now describe as dementia with Lewy bodies were going into Alzheimer’s clinics looking for answers,” Holden said. “Doctors and specialists would be confused by the presentation of their symptoms, since it varied so much from Alzheimer’s disease. And if you're not seeing the full picture and addressing and evaluating all those pieces, you might come to the wrong conclusion if you're looking at it from a different angle.”
In the following Q&A, Holden describes how the field of Lewy body dementia is improving diagnostics and patient care through enhanced screening, new drugs and therapeutics, and a personalized care approach.