Senile Dementia: An Old-Fashioned Concept

Abstract

The concept of senile dementia was widely accepted at the transition of the 19th to the 20th century. The pioneering researchers found different pathologies in the brains of old demented patients, apparently linked to the clinical severity of the disease. The scientific communication by Alois Alzheimer describing a 51-year-old woman with dementia led to the establishment of a distinction between senile dementia and presenile dementia or Alzheimer’s disease that persisted for several decades. Later in the 20th century, research on clinicopathological series found that there were no significant differences between senile and presenile cases except for age, and a single designation was adopted – Alzheimer’s disease. The term senile dementia was essentially dropped.

Recently, the presence of different pathologies in the brains of demented old patients has been emphasised. The view that in older patients the presence of brain co-pathologies is very common and is associated to cognitive decline seems to have come intriguingly close to the pioneering researchers’ concept of senile dementia.