Symptomatology of Dementia

Han, Il Woo

Abstract

Dementia can be defined as an acquired persistent impairment of intellectual func-tion with compromise in at least three of the mental activities such as language, memory, visuospatial skill, emotion or personality, and cognition. The purposes of diagnosing a dementia syndrome are to search systemically for various etiologies, to differentiate reversible or irreversible dementia, cortical or subcortical dementia, and degenerative or nondegenerative dementia, and to apply to patients neurocognitive rehabilitation or other specific trea-tment strategies. The evaluation of dementia includes neuropsychiatric history taking, neuropsychological assessment, neurologic examination, neuroimaging studies, and laboratory studies. It is impossible to evaluate dementic patients only with clinical signs, symptoms, and neuropsychiatric histories. But I will address specific neurologic or neuropsychiatric symptoms and signs of various dementias to und-erstand them as classification.