Neocortical Lewy body counts correlate with dementia in the Lewy body variant of Alzheimer's disease

Patients with the Lewy body variant (LBV) of Alzheimer's disease (AD) meet diagnostic criteria for AD but have a lighter burden of plaque and tangle AD pathology despite comparable dementia. We quantified neocortical Lewy bodies (LB) in LBV patients (n = 14) using anti-ubiquitin polyclonal antibody, selecting for quantification those neocortical regions with the highest densities of LB. Neocortical neurofibrillary tangles (NFT) and neuritic plaques were evaluated with thioflavin-S. A group of classical AD patients (n = 12), matched for disease duration, was also studied. For most of these cases, entorhinal neurofibrillary pathology had previously been assessed by applying a modification of the Braak and Braak AD staging protocol. Although LBV and AD groups had similar mental test scores when last evaluated prior to death, lower neocortical NFT and plaque counts and lower modified Braak stages were observed in LBV. Neocortical NFT counts correlated with impaired neuropsychological test performance in AD but not in LBV. Plaque counts did not correlate with mental status in either group. Lewy body concentrations in four neocortical areas correlated significantly with dementia severity in LBV. The association of AD lesions in the neocortex with dementia in LBV was comparatively weaker than that observed for LB concentrations. These findings suggest that neocortical LB combined with entorhinal NFT or subcortical Parkinson's disease-type pathology may equalize the degree of dementia seen in LBV with that encountered in classical AD.