2023-12-30 22:29:00
By evaluating patients with DPR symptoms, researchers identified key factors associated with treatable causes of the disease, representing a significant advance in the identification and treatment of this debilitating condition.
A team of Mayo Clinic scientists have identified new scoring criteria that allow the detection of treatable forms of rapidly progressive dementia (RPD) with great effectiveness during a patient’s first clinical visit.
This criterion may allow physicians to substantially reduce the time needed to begin treatment. The findings are published in Annals of Neurology.
Rapidly progressive dementia is caused by several disorders that rapidly impair intellectual functioning and interfere with normal activities and relationships. If patients’ symptoms appear suddenly and subside quickly, a doctor can make the diagnosis of DPR.
These patients can progress from initial symptoms of dementia to complete disability, requiring full-time care, in less than two years. The study analyzed data from 155 patients with DPR who were diagnosed at the Mayo Clinic in Florida and Washington University in St. Louis.
Rapidly progressive dementia, a challenge for modern medicine due to its rapid evolution and severe impact on cognitive functions, has found new hope in a Mayo Clinic study
The mean age of the patients at the time of symptom onset was 69 years. Patients underwent a standard evaluation, including brain MRI, electroencephalogram, blood tests, and lumbar puncture.
They were then followed for up to two years. The study team reviewed the data, assigned clinical diagnoses, and determined which diseases would be considered potentially amenable to treatment. He then compared symptoms and test results between patients with causes that responded to treatment and those that did not respond to treatment.
This identified key factors that were present at the time of the patient’s first visit and were associated with treatment-responsive causes of DPR. Seizures, tumors, MRI features of autoimmune encephalitis, movement abnormalities, and other conditions were associated with treatment-responsive causes of PRD in the study.
Early recognition of key symptoms and test findings is crucial in the fight against DPR, according to the Mayo Clinic study (Illustrative Image Infobae)
95 percent of patients with these conditions were diagnosed using a screening score developed by Mayo Clinic researchers. Scoring was calculated by assigning points to clinical findings present during a patient’s first visit to evaluate cognitive impairment.
“Many conditions that cause rapidly progressive dementia can be treated and even reversed. We found that more than half of the patients in our study with rapidly progressive dementia had a treatable underlying condition. “We may be able to identify many of these patients early in the process by intentionally looking for key clinical symptoms and exam findings and integrating them with the results of a brain MRI and lumbar puncture,” said the study’s lead author, Dr. Gregory Day, clinical researcher, neurologist and vice chair of research in the Department of Neurology at Mayo Clinic in Florida.
Dr. Day’s previous research found that other diseases can mimic a rare brain disorder called Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, which is also linked to dementia.
The Mayo Clinic study indicates the possibility of reversing certain forms of rapidly progressive dementia through early treatment (Illustrative Image Infobae)
“It is crucial to treat patients earlier by identifying a condition that is causing their rapidly progressive dementia,” said Dr. Nihal Satyadev, a neurology resident at Mayo Clinic in Florida and first author of the study.
“It is equally important to recognize patients who are less likely to benefit from treatment, as this may allow the focus of care to shift towards quality of life support and appropriate counselling.”
The study authors plan to continue research to improve the diagnosis and treatment of patients with RPD and make it easier for doctors to apply their tool to recognize patients with this disease.
The team has already completed a project considering cerebrospinal fluid biomarkers that may improve diagnosis and early recognition of treatable patients. These findings are also published in Annals of Neurology.
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