%0 Journal Article
%T Diagnosis and biomarkers of predementia in Alzheimer's disease
%A Orestes V Forlenza
%A Breno S Diniz
%A Wagner F Gattaz
%J BMC Medicine
%D 2010
%I BioMed Central
%R 10.1186/1741-7015-8-89
%X Alzheimer's disease (AD) is the most common dementing disorder in older people. As a consequence of population aging worldwide, a fourfold increase in the prevalence of AD is expected to occur over the next decades. Recent estimates foresee that more than 80 million individuals will be affected by the disease by 2040, which is a natural consequence of the age-dependent increase in the number of incident cases of AD [1-3]. An important contemporaneous challenge in the management of AD is to establish its early diagnosis, or, ideally, to identify the cases of AD prior to the actual onset of dementia. This requires the development of new diagnostic tools to predict the dementia outcome among older people with very mild symptoms of cognitive dysfunction, or even in asymptomatic individuals. Although a few promising methods have been experimentally validated, the translation of the current knowledge into clinical practice still requires methodological pruning and guidance by operational criteria.The National Institute on Aging and the Alzheimer's Association have recently convened working groups to re-edit the diagnostic criteria for AD dementia, taking into account the vast expansion of the knowledge of the neurobiology of the disease, most of which was obviously unavailable by the time the original National Institute of Neurological and Communicative Disorders and Stroke-Alzheimer's Disease and Related Disorders Association (NINCDS-ADRDA) criteria were launched 26 years ago [4,5]. Another important accomplishment of these workgroups was to revise the clinical and biological correlates of AD in the symptomatic predementia phase, yielding the proposition of the diagnostic criteria for 'mild cognitive impairment (MCI) due to AD' [6]. The authors incorporated the use of biomarkers to define three levels of certainty of the clinical diagnosis, given the characterization of mild cognitive deficits in non-demented older people: (i) 'MCI of a neurodegenerative etiology', in th
%U http://www.biomedcentral.com/1741-7015/8/89