ABSTRACT
References 550
As early as 1896, ‘arteriosclerotic dementia’ (referring to vascular dementia (VaD)) was separated from ‘senile dementia’ (referring to Alzheimer’s disease (AD)). Alois Alzheimer together with Otto Binswanger recognized the heterogeneity of VaD by describing four clinical pathological subtypes of VaD (Roma´n, 2001), as well as vascular lesions in AD. Nevertheless, until the 1970s, cerebral atherosclerosis causing chronic strangulation of blood supply to the brain, was thought to be the most common cause of dementia, and AD was regarded as a rare cause affecting only younger patients. Tomlinson et al. (Tomlinson et al., 1970) reinvented AD as the more frequent cause of dementia. In 1979, Hachinski and colleagues used the term ‘multi-infarct (multistroke) dementia’ (MID) to describe the mechanism by which they considered VaD was produced (Hachinski et al., 1974). As the pendulum swung in the direction of AD, vascular forms of dementia became relegated to a position of relative obscurity (Brust, 1988).
