Inherited dementias

Dementia, defined as progressive cognitive decline, is a feature of a wide variety of genetic disorders. For example, a search of "dementia" in the Online Mendelian Inheritance in Man (www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Omim) reveals 162 entries. Therefore this article cannot be encyclopedic and will be necessarily restricted to more prevalent or illustrative etiologies of familial dementia in adults. These disorders also have in common an initial and primarily dementing clinical presentation. Thus, this article is limited to: familial Alzheimer's disease (AD) and related amyloid angiopathies, frontotemporal dementias (FTD) and related tauopathies, familial prion diseases, British and Danish familial dementias, and cerebral autosomal dominant arteriopathy with subcortical infarcts and leukoencephalopathy (CADASIL).