ARTERIOSCLEROTIC BRAIN ATROPHY

Although Alzheimer is best known for the disease which bears his name and which was given its eponymous title by Kraepelin (1910), he established his reputation on his work on arteriosclerotic dementia, about which he wrote very extensively (1895, 1897, 1898, 1902, 1913). This early paper on the topic is concise and lacks the extensive, repetitive and extremely detailed neuropathological descriptions which are features of many others. Both in this paper and elsewhere, Alzheimer shows striking originality which is usually associated with modesty and generous attributions of primacy to those who may have described what he is writing about before him. This paper is naturally marked by the preoccupation with the separation of arteriosclerotic dementia from general paralysis of the insane since he was writing at a time when syphilis was probably the commonest cause of dementia. He shared the concerns and aims of Binswanger (1894), whose name is now associated with subcortical vascular disease. Both here and in his later publications, Alzheimer gave clear clinical guidelines which might allow his contemporaries to distinguish vascular dementia from general paralysis and senile dementia. The paper was presented at the yearly congress of the Society of German Alienists in Dresden in 1894 and published in the Allgemeine Zeitschift für Psychiatrie (1895). Alzheimer's style of writing is at times ponderous, opaque and repetitive. We have attempted to preserve as much as possible of the text's flavour while trying to make it comprehensible. We hope that it will draw some attention to Alzheimer's importance in the evolution of the concept of vascular dementia. Copyright © 1991 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.