WHAT TYPE OF DEMENTIA DOES IT CAUSE?
Again, traditional diagnostic criteria have hampered investigation of this question. An increasing body of epidemiological evidence suggests that vascular risk factors such as hypertension, diabetes and hyperlipidaemia are risk factors not only for the development of vascular dementia but also for Alzheimer’s disease (Stewart, 1998). Community-based research can be criticised in that neuroimaging has not been routinely used in diagnostic assessment, so that subclinical levels of cerebrovascular disease may have been missed and mixed dementia misidentified as Alzheimer’s disease. This issue, however, should be more a consideration of mechanisms by which vascular risk factors are associated with dementia rather than one of arbitrarily defined diagnostic categories. Post-stroke studies have found that dementia appears to follow an Alzheimer’s disease-like course in the majority of cases (Kokmen et al, 1996) and that approximately 10% of people with post-stroke dementia have had gradually
