How common is dementia with Lewy bodies?
- Cambridge Centre for Brain Repair and Department of Neurology, Forvie Site, Robinson Way, Cambridge CB2 2PY, UK
- Correspondence to: R A Barker; rab46{at}cus.cam.ac.uk
Meeting consensus criteria for the diagnosis of DLB
Establishing frequency figures for diseases for which there is no reliable biomarker during life is particularly difficult. As a result, various diagnostic criteria have been established to improve the accuracy of clinical diagnoses for the neurodegenerative disorders, based on the previous evidence of clinicopathological studies of defined pathologies. Such consensus clinical criteria are invaluable for increasing the specificity and precision of diagnoses, although with increasing specificity comes an inevitable loss of sensitivity, such that some cases get overlooked.
In this issue (see pp 720–724) Rahkonen et al have attempted to define the prevalence of dementia with Lewy bodies (DLB) in people over the age of 75 using a population based approach, in the Finnish city of Kuopio.1 This study randomly selects 700 out …
