Introductory remarks to the following papers of this volume presented during the meeting on ‘Psychometry in aging and dementia’

Abstract

In highly developed countries, increasing longevity has resulted in an increase in the incidence of age-related diseases. For the human brain, disabilities such as brain infarction, parkinsonism and the dementias were found to be of particular significance with aging. In general, diagnosis of brain infarction and parkinsonism by means of well-established clinical methods does not entail very great difficulties. This may also hold true for post-mortem diagnosis of different dementia types. The most important of these can be classified by means of morphological techniques into dementia of Alzheimer type, and multi infarct dementia and dementia of vascular type, respectively (Corsellis, 1969; Tomlinson, 1980). Otherwise, making a clear-cut diagnosis of different dementia types by means of clinical methods is very difficult. Thus, it has proved most useful to attribute psychiatric symptoms to different dementia types, to separate primary from secondary dementia (Mayer-Gross, 1969; Roth, 1978), and to use the ischemic score to distinguish multi infarct dementia from other primary dementia types (Hachinski et al., 1975; Tomlinson et al., 1970). The ischemic score, although sometimes modified (Loeb, 1980; Rosen et al., 1980), has proved to be helpful for diagnosing vascular dementia with a high incidence. However, it has also become clear that the diagnostic exclusion of vascular dementia does not necessarily mean that the other primary dementias may exclusively be assigned to the major type of primary dementias, the dementia of Alzheimer type (Constantinidis, 1978; Tomlinson, 1980). Other primary dementias such as Pick's disease and Jacob-Creutzfeldt disease, and pseudo-dementia (Kiloh, 1961; Kral, 1982; Shraberg, 1978; Wells, 1979), which may mimick dementia of Alzheimer type, should also be differentiated from the latter by means of psychometric test scores which can easily be handled. Thus, the availability of a psychometric test battery to differentiate primary dementias more easily and more exactly had become most desirable, although other methods used clinically, such as electroencephalography and computerized tomography of the brain, have been found to be most useful in dementia classification (Constantinidis et al., 1969; Gordon and Sim, 1967; Lete