5 Key Takeaways

• 1

  Overlapping symptoms and mixed pathologies can make clinical presentation alone insufficient to distinguish Alzheimer’s disease from dementia with Lewy bodies and other dementias.

• 2

  Skin biopsy testing detects cutaneous phosphorylated alpha-synuclein, a protein associated with synucleinopathies, including Lewy body disease.

• 3

  In the Syn-D study, cutaneous phosphorylated alpha-synuclein was detected in participants with mild cognitive impairment associated with suspected dementia with Lewy bodies.

• 4

  A 6-month study of patients with dementia with Lewy bodies estimated an approximately 52% annualized increase in cutaneous phosphorylated alpha-synuclein from baseline.

• 5

  Some Syn-D participants had both cutaneous phosphorylated alpha-synuclein and abnormal phosphorylated tau 217 findings, suggesting coexisting Lewy body and Alzheimer disease pathologies.