ABSTRACT
A critical examination of the biomedical interpretation of dementia reveals that the assumption of an exclusive causal relationship between neuropathology on the one hand and dementia on the other is unjustified. A key criterion of a disease is that 'distinct pathological features be present in all cases where the symptoms appear, and in none of the cases where they do not'. Researchers have identified that clinical measures of dementia severity do not correlate well with the extent and type of neuropathic change found at post-mortem. A biomedical paradigm which interprets dementia solely as the consequence of brain-cell death cannot adequately account for much which is observed and known about the presentation and progression of dementia. The dominance of the disease model observed in general medicine understandably permeates the world of neuropathology and dementia care. The discovery of neurological correlates with specific dementia profiles, along with increasingly sophisticated methods of neurological investigation.
