Neuropsychiatric symptoms in 921 elderly subjects with dementia: a comparison between vascular and neurodegenerative types.

i) to describe the neuropsychiatric profile of elderly subjects with dementia by comparing vascular (VaD) and degenerative dementias, i.e. dementia with Lewy bodies (DLB) and Alzheimer's disease (AD); ii) to assess whether the severity and type of dementia are associated with clinically relevant neuropsychiatric symptoms (CR-NPS).One hundred and thirty-one out-patients with VaD, 100 with DLB and 690 with AD were studied. NPS were evaluated by the neuropsychiatric inventory (NPI).Vascular dementia had lower total and domain-specific NPI scores and a lower frequency of CR-NPS than AD and DLB, for which frequency of CR-NPS increased significantly with disease severity, particularly in AD. Logistic regression analysis showed that a higher CDR score and a diagnosis of degenerative dementia were independently associated with CR-NPS.Vascular dementia is associated less with CR-NPS than AD and DLB. Frequency of CR-NPS increases with disease severity in AD and, to a lesser extent, in DLB.