Eva Dierckx

It’s often very difficult for clinicians to differentiate Alzheimer’s disease (AD) from depression among elderly due to common cognitive and affective problems that may occur in both mild AD and the so called depressive pseudodementia. Existing instruments for screening for dementia and depression are largely insufficient to make an early differential diagnosis. An early diagnosis of AD though is very important because patients may benefit from cognition-enhancing drugs; the treatment with these cholinesterase inhibitors is proven to have the greatest efficacy early in the course of dementia. Nowadays Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) has been suggested as a term for a boundary area between normal ageing and AD (i.e. preclinical AD), so the differentiation between MCI patients who progress to have a dementia and depressed elderly (whose cognition is able to improve) becomes obvious. In our research we want to investigate whether our neuropsychological test battery (based on theoretical paradigms on memory and i

It’s often very difficult for clinicians to differentiate Alzheimer’s disease (AD) from depression among elderly due to common cognitive and affective problems that may occur in both mild AD and the so called depressive pseudodementia. Existing instruments for screening for dementia and depression are largely insufficient to make an early differential diagnosis. An early diagnosis of AD though is very important because patients may benefit from cognition-enhancing drugs; the treatment with these cholinesterase inhibitors is proven to have the greatest efficacy early in the course of dementia. Nowadays Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) has been suggested as a term for a boundary area between normal ageing and AD (i.e. preclinical AD), so the differentiation between MCI patients who progress to have a dementia and depressed elderly (whose cognition is able to improve) becomes obvious. In our research we want to investigate whether our neuropsychological test battery (based on theoretical paradigms on memory and i