Guideline-based diagnosis of dementia etiology

Dementia encompasses a variety of underlying conditions among which Alzheimer's disease represents the most common cause and in addition, vascular and Parkinson's disease dementia, dementia with Lewy bodies and frontotemporal lobar degeneration. All the current guidelines specify a two-step procedure for the diagnostics of dementia. The first step entails performing a comprehensive description, diagnosis and confirmation of the syndrome. The presented article focuses on the second step: diagnosis of the etiology. This review gives an overview of the current diagnostic approaches including the new proposals of the biomarker in cerebrospinal fluid.