The clinical differential diagnosis of dementia: concept and methodology

Dementia is a rather heterogeneous syndrome. This heterogeneity is expressed in the diversity of its clinical characteristics and its evolution and in the underlying etiologic factors. Unfortunately, these divisions do not run in parallel. Therefore, considerable diversity exists in the manifestations of each pathologic entity, thus making a clinical diagnosis of dementia type an educated guess at best. The need for biologic markers of the various entities is stressed in this article.