Gene/Protein Disease Symptom Drug Enzyme Compound
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Query: UMLS:C0030552 (paresis)
 5,831 document(s) hit in 31,850,051 MEDLINE articles (0.00 seconds)

Binswanger, in his 1894 dissertation on the differential diagnosis of general paresis of the insane, described a slowly progressive dementia associated with macroscopic loss of white matter. In recent years interest in Binswanger's disease was rekindled with CT demonstration of extensive white matter low densities in some patients. To define the clinical spectrum, we reviewed 22 consecutive cases in which the CT appearances suggested a diagnosis of Binswanger's disease. Two patients had focal neurological deficits at presentation, but recent anoxic or hypoglycaemic insults could not be excluded as the cause of the CT abnormalities. The 20 remaining patients were demented and showed variable combinations of corticobulbar dysfunction and gait dyspraxia. The duration of symptoms ranged from a few months to several years. Sixty per cent of this group gave a history of discrete stroke events and focal cortical and/or lacunar infarcts were a frequent CT finding. Binswanger's disease is probably due to chronic or acute-on-chronic white matter ischaemia. The association with lacunar and cortical infarctions suggests that a combination of large and small vessel disease produces diffuse ischaemia maximal in white matter watershed zones. Binswanger's disease is clinically differentiated from multi-infarct dementia by its time course.
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PMID:Subcortical arteriosclerotic encephalopathy: Binswanger's disease. 366 81

The history of senile dementia begins in the Greco-Roman period with basic concepts of senility by Pythagoras and Hippocrates. During the Middle Ages, the main contribution was by Roger Bacon in 1290. The first textbook of neurology, De cerebri morbis, by Jaso de Pratis (1549), included a chapter on dementia ("De memoriae detrimento"). In the 17th century, Thomas Willis recognized intellectual loss with aging. In the 19th century, Philippe Pinel removed chains from the mentally ill; his student Esquirol wrote the first modern classification of mental disease, including senile dementia. In 1860, Morel recognized brain atrophy with aging. The modern history of vascular dementia began in 1896, when Emil Kraepelin in his textbook Psychiatrie included "arteriosclerotic dementia" among the senile dementias, following the ideas of Otto Binswanger and Alois Alzheimer, who had differentiated clinically and pathologically arteriosclerotic brain lesions from senile dementia and from neurosyphilitic general paresis of the insane. Binswanger's and Alzheimer's contributions are reviewed in detail.
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PMID:A historical review of the concept of vascular dementia: lessons from the past for the future. 1060 75