Alzheimer’s Disease: Current Clinical and Neuropathologic Diagnostic Criteria

Alzheimer’s disease is the most common cause of dementia, accounting for 50-60% of cases at clinical and autopsy series. Recent advances have enabled detailed understanding of the molecular pathogenesis of this devastating disease, and the updated consensus criteria for its clinical and neuropathological diagnosis have increased the diagnostic accuracy and sensitivity versus other dementias considerably. However, due to frequent overlap between dementing disorders and multiple confounding pathologies in the aged brain, both clinical and postmortem studies entail biases that affect both their general applicability and validity. This brief critical review discusses the diagnostic validity and limitations of currently used clinical and morphological criteria for the diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease and gives recommendations for future clinico-pathologic research.