Lewy body dementia (LBD) burst on the scientific scene as a major concern for clinicians and pathologists little more than a decade ago. The Lewy body had previously been considered a common, if enigmatic, marker of idiopathic Parkinson's disease, but it suddenly became a focus of interest as ubiquitin stains revealed that up to 30 per cent of patients diagnosed clinically and pathologically with Alzheimer's disease have Lewy bodies in substantial numbers of cortical neurons. Is this a newly recognized dementing illness or a variant of Alzheimer's disease; what does the Lewy body tell us about deranged intracellular metabolism; do cortical Lewy bodies cause a dementia syndrome and if so how abundant must they be to produce cognitive impairment; is LBD clinically recognizable; what is the relationship between LBD and Parkinson's disease; does LBD have a different treatment response profile than Alzheimer's disease? These are the questions that the current volume strives to answer or at least to put into perspective and set the stage for future investigations.

Dementia with Lewy Bodies is organized into three sections: clinical aspects, pathology, and treatment. Prefaced by a fascinating biography of Lewy – who first described in 1913 the eosinophilic inclusions that came to bear his name – the clinical section addresses the current state of knowledge regarding the clinical syndrome associated with cortical Lewy bodies. Lewy body dementia and Alzheimer's disease are not differentiated by widely used clinical and research diagnostic criteria, and studies currently reported as describing the phenomenology and treatment of Alzheimer's disease almost certainly include a mixture of patients with Alzheimer's disease and patients with LBD.