Quantifying the quiet epidemic: Diagnosing dementia in late 20^th-century Britain.

When the post-mortem observations were combined with BDS scores, Blessed, Tomlinson and Roth claimed to find a ‘highly significant correlation between mean plaque counts and scores for dementia’ (1968: 804), which they argued dealt a significant blow to the psychodynamic belief that pathological change was of little significance to cognitive decline. 13 Although Blessed, Tomlinson and Roth observed senile plaques in the brains of controls and patients with affective disorders, who had mean plaque counts ranging from 1 to 5, patients diagnosed with dementia had a far higher mean plaque count of 20.85, and there was a general ‘tendency for performance on the test to decline with increasing plaque formation’ (1968: 803).

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