World Lewy Body Dementia Awareness Day: Advancing Research and Early Diagnosis

Today, on World Lewy Body Dementia Awareness Day, at the Center for Research on Neurological Diseases (CIEN), we aim to raise awareness of this neurodegenerative disease and share our commitment to research that seeks to improve diagnosis and care for patients and their families.

Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) is an intermediate stage between normal cognitive aging and dementia. Detecting it early and accurately allows for interventions that could slow cognitive decline before dementia symptoms appear.

However, correctly identifying the underlying cause of MCI remains a clinical challenge. Large clinicopathological studies have shown that only about 50% of patients diagnosed with amnestic MCI (traditionally considered a prodrome of Alzheimer’s disease) actually present Alzheimer’s pathology at autopsy. This finding highlights the need for more specific and reliable biomarkers.

In this context, CIEN is conducting the study “Characterization of Neuroimaging and Biomarkers of Lewy Body Pathology in Patients with Mild Cognitive Impairment,” funded by the Reina Sofía Foundation. The main objective is to study and validate new biomarkers for Lewy body pathology in MCI, contributing to precise patient phenotyping and advancing toward a precision medicine model in neurodegenerative diseases.

To achieve this, CIEN has unique resources:

• A biobank of approximately 800 brain donors
• Postmortem CSF samples
• Multimodal 3T MRI data from both ante- and postmortem assessments in a patient subgroup

This dataset allows for neuropathological validation studies of CSF and neuroimaging biomarkers, offering an exceptional opportunity to improve the diagnosis and understanding of dementias.

On this World Lewy Body Dementia Awareness Day, we reaffirm our commitment to translational research that transforms knowledge into real impact for patients and families, and we thank the Reina Sofía Foundation for supporting this project.