Volume 71 Number 1 January 2004	back to contents

From the ¹Department of Psychiatry, Mount Sinai School of Medicine, New York, NY; ²Bronx Veterans Affairs Medical Center, Bronx, NY; ³Department of Psychology, Queens College and The Graduate Center of the City University of New York, New York, NY; and ⁴Department of Psychiatry, Beth Israel Medical Center, New York, NY.

Address all correspondence to Steven C. Samuels, M.D., Department of Psychiatry, Box 1230, Mount Sinai School of Medicine, One East 100th Street, New York, NY 10029; E-mail: Steven.Samuels@med.va.gov

Supported by Federal grants NIA P01-AG02219 and P50-AG05138.

A portion of this research was presented at the annual meeting of the American Association for Geriatric Psychiatry, San Francisco, CA, February 2001. Accepted for publication March 2003.

ABSTRACT

Depression has frequently been cited as a manifestation of dementia with Lewy bodies (DLB). Previous studies have suggested an increase of depression in patients with DLB, compared to those with Alzheimer's disease (AD). The purpose of this study was to examine depressive symptomatology in nursing home residents, from a consecutive series of DLB (n=16) and AD (n=39) autopsy-confirmed cases. Subjects received standard neuropathological analysis and postmortem chart review for clinical assessment of depression. Depressive symptomatology did not differ between the AD and DLB groups, and there was no significant relationship between depression and cortical or subcortical Lewy body (LB) count in the locus ceruleus or substantia nigra. This study suggests that the presence or absence of depression cannot be used to distinguish between AD and DLB. Furthermore, depressive symptomatology in DLB does not appear to be related to severity of cortical or subcortical LB pathology.

KEYWORDS

Dementia, depression, Lewy bodies, Alzheimer's disease, autopsy.

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