A mysterious dementia that mimics Alzheimer’s gets named LATE
It’s possible about a quarter of people age 85 and older have the newly described disease
A newly described dementia strikes people in their last decades of life. The disease, aptly named LATE, comes with symptoms that resemble Alzheimer’s disease, but is thought to be caused by something completely different.
An international team of scientists and clinicians describe the disease and officially christen it LATE, which stands for the more technical description, “limbic-predominant age-related TDP-43 encephalopathy,” online April 30 in Brain. Study coauthor Peter Nelson, a neuropathologist at the University of Kentucky in Lexington, helped organize a meeting last year that addressed a growing realization among doctors and scientists: “There’s this disease, and it doesn’t have a name,” he says.