ABSTRACT
Alois Alzheimer reported a “peculiar” dementia in a 51-year-old woman at the meeting of South-
West Germany Psychiatrists in Tu¨binge´n on November 3 and 4, 1906. Alzheimer’s seminal
contribution was to correlate the cognitive and behavioral features of the disorder with the
histopathological findings of “miliary foci” and neurofibrillary change in the cerebral cortex
following the woman’s death at age 55 years (1). On the 100th anniversary of Alzheimer’s report
of the disease that now bears his name, it is appropriate to review the approach to the diagnosis of
Alzheimer’s disease (AD), the most common cause of dementia in older adults.
