The traditional view of dementia is that the features most important to accurate diagnosis and management are
cognitive decline and functional disability. Behavioural and psychological symptoms have generally been thought to
be of secondary importance, but new evidence suggests that these are important determinants of patients’ distress,
carer burden, and outcome in dementia; they can also be valuable diagnostic pointers to the underlying pathological
cause and disease diagnosis. Better methods to detect and measure the severity of behavioural and psychological
symptoms are needed and these could be used in well-designed intervention trials