Neuropathology of neurodegenerative disorders

Advances in clinical detection and assessment of patients with neurodegenerative disease are assisting clinicians in the diagnosis and treatment of their patients; however, there are many diseases that cause progressive cognitive impairment and many of them have overlapping clinical features. It is also common for patients to have concurrent primary diseases of the brain or concomitant systemic diseases that cause cognitive decline. As such, postmortem neuropathologic evaluation is still the gold standard for the diagnosis of neurodegenerative disease. This chapter will review current autopsy procedures, and gross and microscopic neuropathologic evaluation of the most common neurodegenerative diseases that cause progressive cognitive impairment.