Depressive disorder with psychotic symptoms as psychiatric presentation of sporadic Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease: a case report

Abstract

Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD) is a rare neurodegenerative disease and shows a wide range of early clinical manifestation. We report the case of Ms. A, a 50-year-old woman, who exhibited an atypical psychiatric presentation of CJD at the beginning of the disease, as a depressive disorder with psychotic features. We discuss this case, the clinical attitudes that can lead to misdiagnose such presentation of CJD with other psychiatric diseases, and propose to repeat complementary investigations when the diagnostic is evocated, even if these tests are often negative or nonspecific in the early stages of CJD.