Thorough work-up and new diagnostic criteria needed for CJD.

摘要

Sporadic Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (sCJD), the prototypical rapidly progressive dementia (RPD), is currently untreatable. Because many other conditions mimic CJD, several of which are treatable or even curable, it is imperative that patients with suspected sCJD be thoroughly evaluated for non-prion diagnoses. Chitravas and colleagues investigated the pathological diagnoses, based on brain autopsies, of 1,106 patients who were referred for potential prion disease to the National Prion Disease Pathology Surveillance Center (NPDPSC) at Case Western Reserve University from 2006-2009.4 The researchers found that approximately one-third of cases did not have prion disease, with Alzheimer disease and vascular dementia being the most common conditions among these patients.