rvis and Soltz advised that only clinical criteria would suffice for a diagnosis of AD (Mahendra, 14). In 1948 Jervis published his landmark paper called "Early senile dementia in Mongoloid idiocy." Jervis described three individuals with Down's syndrome (DS), aged 37, 42 and 47 years, each of whom had shown a profound emotional and intellectual deterioration in the last few years of life. At autopsy, all were found to have SP and two also displayed NFT (Beach, 39). This was the first demonstration of NFT in DS and the first full clinical and pathological correlation supporting an Alzheimer-like syndrome in DS (Beach, 39).Research in dementia began to revive in the early sixties. New causes of the dementia syndrome have been recognized including, depression, which in the form of psuedodementia may mimic dementia (Kiloh, 1961), progressive supranuclear palsy (Steele et al, 1964) and normal pressure hydrocephalus (Adams et al, 1965) , (cited in Pitt, 6). Prior to the 1960's dementia was still viewed as a chronic, irreversible and untreatable condition (Mahendra, 14). Accordingly, in the 1960s, several writers in Europe called for a revision of the concept and emphasized that irreversibility should not be viewed as an essential feature of dementia. Another important change that took place in the 1960's concerned epidemiology. Prior to the sixties arteriosclerosis was thought to be the predominant cause of dementia, whereas AD was thought to be rare (Pitt, 12). However, arteriosclerosis was decisively challenged as the prime cause of dementia by several reports between 1960 and 1970 (i.e.,Tomlinson, Blessed, and Roth, 1968 and 1970). These reports demonstrated that arteriosclerosis was greatly overestimated as a cause of dementia, and that the majority of patients dying with dementia in fact showed the characteristic plaques and tangles of AD. Furthermore, Katzman, in 1976 argued that because of similarity in the clinical p...
