Vascular Dementia in a Population-Based Autopsy Study

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Abstract
THE CONTRIBUTION of vascular pathologic characteristics to dementia is complex and remains unclear. This is reflected in the poor validity of clinical diagnostic criteria when compared with postmortem diagnoses.1-7 However, the interpretation of clinicopathologic studies has been hampered by different sources of patients across studies. For example, the frequency of vascular dementia (VaD) in autopsy series was much higher when recruitment was from well-defined populations1,8 compared with dementia clinics.5,9 The relative rarity of prospective studies of patients with dementia who prove to have VaD neuropathologically limits our ability to improve clinical diagnostic criteria.