Hippocampal dysfunction is associated with early clinical signs of Alzheimer's disease (AD). Due to the limited availability or invasiveness of current biomarkers, the AD diagnosis is usually based on cognitive assessment and structural brain imaging. The recent study by Lalive and colleagues examined the specificity of brain morphometry for the AD diagnosis in a memory clinic cohort with hippocampal-type amnestic syndrome. The results indicate that memory deficits and hippocampal atrophy are similar in AD and non-AD patients, highlighting their low diagnostic specificity. These findings challenge the traditional AD diagnosis and underscore the need for biomarkers to differentiate specific neuropathological entities.
Keywords: Alzheimer’s disease; Lewy body dementia; behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia; cerebrospinal fluid; limbic-predominant age-related TDP-43 encephalopathy; mild cognitive impairment; positron emission tomography; primary age-related tauopathy; subjective cognitive decline; suspected non-Alzheimer’s disease pathophysiology.