**5.3 Vascular dementia**

When dementia results from many small strokes, it is known as vascular dementia. In contrast to other dementias, it is relatively straightforward to diagnose vascular dementia from clinical symptoms, and with MRI or CT. Typically therefore nuclear medicine imaging is not needed for patients with pure vascular dementia (Ishii, 2002). On occasion however, vascular dementia can be associated with AD pathology. In such cases, FDG PET can be employed to distinguish vascular dementia from the reduced glucose metabolism profile associated with AD (see Section 2.2).
