Pregabalin as a Treatment for Anxiety in Patients With Dementia With Lewy Bodies: A Case Series.

BACKGROUND: Anxiety is a common and invalidating symptom of dementia with Lewy bodies (DLB). METHODS: To evaluate the efficacy of pregabalin as a treatment for anxiety in DLB, we screened all medical files of our patients with DLB for the use of pregabalin in this context. FINDINGS: Overall, pregabalin was well tolerated. Ten (62.5%) of 16 patients showed an improvement of anxiety, whereas in 3 of them, anxiety disappeared completely, at respectively 3, 11, and 22 months of follow-up, with total daily doses ranging from 75 to 150 mg. Positive response to pregabalin was associated with a significant reduction in benzodiazepine use. CONCLUSIONS: Pregabalin seems a useful and safe tool for treating anxiety in patients with DLB.

Anxiety symptoms are quantitatively and qualitatively different in dementia with Lewy bodies than in Alzheimer's disease in the years preceding clinical diagnosis.

AIM: Dementia with Lewy bodies (DLB) is a common but underdiagnosed type of cognitive impairment and dementia. The current diagnostic criteria for research purposes have a high specificity but lack sensitivity. Moreover, patients who live alone are not always aware that they have core clinical features such as cognitive fluctuations, visual hallucinations, and parasomnia. Anxiety is a common and early manifestation in DLB. METHODS: We matched 41 DLB patients with 41 patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD) according to gender, age, and cognitive status and retrospectively analyzed their files for the presence of anxiety, depression, constipation, and the core clinical features of DLB in the documented period before diagnosis. RESULTS: Anxiety, but not depression, occurred significantly more frequently in DLB than in AD (63.4% vs 26.8%). It appears up to 4-5 years before the diagnosis of DLB and is associated with depression and living at home. Anxiety in DLB was often described as intermittent panic attacks without reason or during states of delirium; it was also severe enough to require medical treatment and inpatient or outpatient psychiatric care. It was often mistaken for a psychiatric illness or a manifestation of other common forms of dementia. Anxiety in AD seemed much milder, was often related to the patient's coping with cognitive dysfunction, and was never cited as a specific reason for medical help. The concomitant presence of anxiety with at least one core clinical criterion of DLB enabled us to differentiate it from AD in our study, with a sensitivity of 63.4% but a specificity of 100%. CONCLUSIONS: In all patients over 50 who present with cognitive problems and anxiety, DLB should be considered. Patients and informants should be carefully questioned regarding the presence of other typical signs and symptoms of DLB.

Dementia with Lewy bodies in first-generation immigrants in a European memory clinic.

We wanted to explore possible differences in disease presentation, frequency, and age of onset of dementia with Lewy bodies (DLB) between first-generation immigrants (FGI) and patients born in Belgium (PBIB). We conducted a retrospective study on all patients of our Memory Clinic between June 1, 2010 and January 31, 2020. A synucleinopathy was diagnosed in 150 of 2702 patients (5.5%): 91 received a diagnosis of DLB (3.4%). FGI were two times more likely to receive a diagnosis of DLB, due to a higher prevalence in North-Africans and Latin-Americans. Visual hallucinations were less frequent in North-Africans than in other immigrants. FGI were younger than PBIB and reported more often parasomnia. Our data suggest a higher risk for DLB in certain immigrant groups. Especially for North-African patients, a genetic factor can be suspected, namely mutations in Leucine-rich repeat kinase 2 (LRRK2). Memory clinics with a high rate of FGI may provide interesting data and insights into the prevalence of DLB, genetic and environmental differences.