Figure 3.

Mind map of the dementia syndrome and its differential diagnoses. The possible etiologies are widely spread across cerebral and systemic diseases. It is important to mention that Alzheimer's Disease (AD) is the most common form of dementia, but AD is not trivial to diagnose, in particular, if it requires to forgo some invasive tests in the elderly. However, the exact diagnosis is of enormous relevance because some possible causes of dementia are curable, such as normal pressure hydrocephalus, metabolic disorders, and immunologic or infectious causes. In the clinic, most patients are diagnosed with AD, vascular dementia, Lewy-body dementia, frontotemporal dementia, or a mixed form thereof (Figure 2). None of the primary neurodegenerative diseases can be treated in a causal and disease-modifying way, besides the treatment of vascular dementia with general atherosclerosis therapy. Their leading proteinopathy sorts the neurodegenerative diseases—caused by Abeta, Tau, prion protein, transactive response DNA binding protein 43 kDa (TDP-43), and alpha-synuclein (Wallesch and Förstl, 2012). Protein images modified from http://www.ebi.ac.uk/. FTD-TDP, frontotemporal degeneration caused by TDP-43; PPA, primary progressive aphasia; FTD-ALS, frontotemporal degeneration with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis; LATE, limbic-predominant age-related TDP-43 encephalopathy; CJD, Creutzfeldt-Jakob's disease; GSS, Gerstmann-Sträußler-Scheinker (syndrome); CAA, cerebral amyloid angiopathy; PCA, posterior cortical atrophy; M. Pick, Pick's Disease.