A 100-year history of dementia with Lewy bodies

Abstract

It takes more than one hundred years to understand dementia with bodies (DLB). Frederick Henry Lewy, a Germany doctor who studied the neuropathology of Parkinson's disease (PD) at Munich University, described eosinophilic intracytoplasmic inclusions in the dorsal vagal nuclei and substantia innominata of PD brains in 1912 for the first time. These inclusions were later named as Lewy body (LB) by a Russian neuropathologist Konstantin Tretiakoff in 1919. A Japanese researcher, Okazaki, correlated dementia to cortical LB in 1961. Kosaka proposed the term Lewy body disease (LBD) for the first time in 1980. Subsequently, more and more researchers delivered case reports and detailed classification of LBD. In 1995, the first Consortium on DLB International Workshop made the unitary denomination of this disease entity and established consensus guidelines for the clinical and pathological diagnosis of DLB. The diagnostic criteria were revised in 2003. Though the history of DLB study is similar to Alzheimer's disease (AD), DLB is still less recognized and needs further research. DOI: 10.3969/j.issn.1672-6731.2015.07.003