Delirium prior to dementia as a clinical phenotype of Lewy body disease: an autopsied case report

Abstract

Although delirium shares clinical characteristics with dementia with Lewy bodies (DLB), there is limited information regarding the relationship between delirium and Lewy body pathology. Here, we report an 89-year-old Japanese woman with an episode of delirium who was pathologically confirmed to have limbic-type Lewy body disease (LBD). Although she exhibited transient visual hallucinations during the delirium, she had no overt dementia. She developed no core clinical features of DLB and died of pneumonia at the age of 90 years. This autopsied case suggests that delirium may be one of the clinical phenotypes of LBD prior to the onset of dementia.