On 30 April, an international team of scientists from Australia, Japan, Sweden, the United Kingdom and the USA published guidelines for a new form of dementia in “Brain a Journal of Neurology”.
Given recent drug development failures and the rising numbers of people affected by dementia, research on the identification of different types of dementia becomes more and more important. Researchers hope that the differentiation of causes of dementia will help in the development of targeted medicines that will be efficacious in distinct groups.
The new disease entity is entitled limbic-predominant age-related TDP-43 encephalopathy with neuropathological change (LATE-NC) and has often been mistaken for Alzheimer’s disease (AD) dementia in autopsy studies due to its pathological similarity in later ages.
The authors now hope to provide a useful guide for scientists to kick-off further investigations on LATE and enable research on the development of biomarkers while they underline that their consensus pathological classification scheme should be considered preliminary since research on this is still at an initial stage.
