AIDS and dementia: a quantitative neuropsychological study of unselected Danish patients

Retrospective studies of hospitalized patients with the acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS) have indicated that dementia occur in the majority of cases. In order to study the occurrence of dementia among AIDS patients, we conducted a controlled study of 16 unselected cases with a battery of neuropsychological tests known to be sensitive to brain damage of various etiologies. Except for fatigue, mental complaints and neuropsychiatric signs of dementia were generally sparse. As a group, the AIDS patients' performance in the neuropsychological tests did not differ from that of matched, healthy controls. Based on analyses of individual test results only one patient performed significantly inferior to what should be expected. The diagnosis of dementia should not be ascribed to AIDS victims on account of non-specific psycho-behavioral deviations that may represent a normal psychologic reaction to the disease, extreme fatigue, or both. Further, frequency measures of dementia in AIDS, based on large, unselected groups and with sufficient control, are still lacking. However, our study indicates that dementia is a less frequent complication of AIDS than so far assumed.