Treatment for patients with Alzheimer's disease differs from that for patients with a vascular component to their dementia. The sooner that these two pathologies can be differentiated, the more effective therapy will be.

Researchers at the University of California, San Francisco found that by adding parietal cortex N-acetylaspartate (NAA) values to MR-derived hippocampal atrophy, it is possible to improve the separation between the two diseases.

Compared with control subjects, patients with vascular dementia had an 18% lower level of NAA in the frontal cortex and a 27% drop in the parietal cortex. When compared with AD patients, those decreases in NAA were even lower (13% in the frontal cortex, 20% in the left parietal cortex). The study appeared in the August issue of Neurology.