Currently more than 47.5 million people of the world have been diagnosed with dementia and this number is expected to reach 75.6 million by 2030 and more than triple by 2050.
Dementia is a severe burden not only for the patient themselves, but their caregivers and families. Nowadays, most countries of the world still lack attention and understanding of dementia. (WHO 2015)
Dementia and Alzheimer’s disease are widespread – in the USA every 68 seconds a person is transferred from the diagnostic group of mild cognitive disorders and is diagnosed with a type of dementia. Based on autopsy data, Alzheimer’s disease is the third most common type of dementia.
Not every loss of memory or dementia is associated with Alzheimer’s disease. Optimal disease management depends on differential diagnostics: mild cognitive disorders, Alzheimer’s disease, dementia with Levi bodies, vascular dementia, primarily progressing aphasia, frontotemporal dementia, progressive supranuclear paralysis, corticobasal degeneration, normal pressure hydrocephalus, Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease and chronic traumatic encephalopathy.
Methods of clinical, laboratory and imaging diagnostics are highly suitable to provide evidence for this, sometimes complicated, process of differential diagnostics of memory disorders.