1. Dementia Slideshow Pictures
2. Alzheimer's Disease Slideshow Pictures
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Medical Author:

Charles Patrick Davis, MD, PhD

Charles Patrick Davis, MD, PhD

Dr. Charles "Pat" Davis, MD, PhD, is a board certified Emergency Medicine doctor who currently practices as a consultant and staff member for hospitals. He has a PhD in Microbiology (UT at Austin), and the MD (Univ. Texas Medical Branch, Galveston). He is a Clinical Professor (retired) in the Division of Emergency Medicine, UT Health Science Center at San Antonio, and has been the Chief of Emergency Medicine at UT Medical Branch and at UTHSCSA with over 250 publications.

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Medical Editor:

Steven Doerr, MD

Steven Doerr, MD

Steven Doerr, MD, is a U.S. board-certified Emergency Medicine Physician. Dr. Doerr received his undergraduate degree in Spanish from the University of Colorado at Boulder. He graduated with his Medical Degree from the University Of Colorado Health Sciences Center in Denver, Colorado in 1998 and completed his residency training in Emergency Medicine from Denver Health Medical Center in Denver, Colorado in 2002, where he also served as Chief Resident.

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Because of the many different types of brain lesions, the prognosis and outcomes of brain lesions are variable. However, with most brain lesion types, the more brain tissue that is damaged or killed by a brain lesion, the worse the prognosis is for the person. Fortunately, the reverse (little damage, good prognosis) is also generally true, but is mainly limited to lesions caused by mild trauma, strokes that affect a very small brain tissue area, a few rapidly treated infections, and occasionally, a few benign and malignant tumors that are effectively treated.

For some brain lesion types, the damage to some brain tissue is not reversible, so the prognosis may be only fair to good, as long as the person's problems do not progress. Another problem with prognosis is that some brain lesions may recur (for example, strokes and brain cancers), while others (genetic, immune, and plaque forming and brain cell death types exemplified by Huntington's disease, multiple sclerosis, Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson' disease) are simply progressive with no effective definitive cure available. The prognosis in the short term may be good if the symptoms respond to treatment, but the long term prognosis usually is considered to be, at best, fair to eventually poor (perhaps many years after the initial diagnosis), due to their progressive nature.

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