History
Binswanger in 1894 was the first to claim that white matter atrophy caused by 'vascular insufficiency' can result in dementia. He described a patient who had slow progression of dementia as well as subcortical white matter atrophy, ventricle enlargement, aphasia, hemianopsia, and hemiparesis. He named this disease 'encenphailitis subcorticalis chronica progressive.' Binswanger did not conduct any microscopic investigations so many did not believe his findings and attributed the neural damage to neural syphilis. Alzheimer in 1902 studied Binswanger's work with pathological evidence that concluded and supported Binswanger's ideas and hypotheses. Alzheimer renamed this disease Binswanger's disease.
In the late 19th century vascular dementia was heavily studied, however by 1910 scientists were lumping Binswanger's disease with all other subcortical and cortical dementia and labeling everything senile dementia despite all previous research and efforts to distinguish this disease from the rest. In 1962 J. Olszewski published an extensive review of all literature about Binswanger's disease so far. He discovered that some of the information in the original reports was incorrect and that at least some of the patients studied in these cases probably had neurosyphilis or other types of dementia. Even with these errors, Olszewski concluded that Binswanger disease did exist as a subset of cerebral arteriosclerosis. Yet again, in 1974 the term multi-infarct dementia was coined and all vascular dementia was grouped into one category. Because of this, the specific names of these types of this dementia, including Binswanger's disease were lost. This was until 1992 when Alzheimer's diagnostic centers created specific criteria known as the Hachinski's Ischemic Scale which became the standard for diagnosing MID or vascular dementia.
Because of the complicated history of Binswanger’s disease and the fact that it was overlooked as a disease at all for so many years, leads us to believe that many patients have been misdiagnosed as Alzheimer’s for years. This leads us to believe that Binswanger’s is more prominent in the population than once thought.
Read more about this topic: Binswanger's Disease
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