ABSTRACT
Neuropsychology contributes greatly to the diagnosis o f dementia: it documents significant cognitive decline and reveals patterns o f cognitive dysfunction that suggest the cause o f the dementia. Cognitive deficits can be detected several years before the clinical diagnosis o f dementia [49]. Establishing the neuropsychological profile often indicates the underlying neuropathology. Although Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is the most frequent disorder, it is not the only cause o f dementia in adults. Therefore carrying out the neuropsychological assessment at an early stage o f dementia has two goals: (a) revealing memory disorders, which are not always associated with memory complaints (memory impairment is a core feature o f dementia, while
memory complaints are not always due to a memory disorder, e.g., in anxiety disorders), and (b) characterizing the memory disorder in the context o f cognitive neuropsychology, thus allowing other cognitive (and noncognitive) functions to be integrated with the memory disorder into a broader syndrome.
