Vascular cognitive disorder: a new diagnostic category updating vascular cognitive impairment and vascular dementia.

Vascular cognitive impairment (VCI) was proposed as an umbrella term to include subjects affected with any degree of cognitive impairment resulting from cerebrovascular disease (CVD), ranging from mild cognitive impairment (MCI) to vascular dementia. VCI may or may not exclude the host of "focal" circumscribed impairments of specialized functions such as language (aphasia), intentional gesture (apraxia), or categorical recognition (agnosia), among others, that may result from a stroke. Therefore, there are no universally accepted diagnostic criteria for VCI.

Executive function: the core feature of dementia?

Links between Alzheimer's disease (AD) and vascular dementia (VaD) have been examined, and this paper investigates the role of executive control function (ECF) within the dementia syndrome. 307 AD patients, 168 VaD patients and 208 controls were compared on tests of cognitive function. Results indicated that controls outperformed both patient groups (p < 0.