Neuropsychiatric profiles in patients with Alzheimer's disease and vascular dementia.

OBJECTIVE

To explore the neuropsychiatric manifestations in patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD) and cortical and subcortical vascular dementia (VaD).

METHODS

We investigated consecutive patients with dementia. All the participants received brain computed tomography. The diagnosis of dementia was confirmed by clinical criteria and the imaging findings. Only patients with probable AD, and subcortical and cortical VaD were included. The Mini Mental State Examination (MMSE) was used to evaluate global cognitive function, and the Neuropsychiatric Inventory (NPI) was used to assess neuropsychiatric symptoms.

RESULTS

Of the 536 participants with dementia, 320 (59.7%) had AD, 161 (30%) had subcortical VaD, 35 (6.4%) had cortical VaD, and 16 (2.9%) had mixed cortical and subcortical VaD. Cortical VaD patients had the highest mean composite NPI scores in all domains and AD patients had the lowest composite scores in most domains. The mean composite scores of the apathy and sleep disturbance domains in patients with cortical VaD were significantly higher than those in the patients with AD after controlling for years of education and MMSE score (p < 0.01).

CONCLUSIONS

There were few differences among the patients with AD, subcortical VaD and cortical VaD. The most consistent differences were the high sleep disturbance scores in those with cortical VaD.