Abstract

"Two cases Capgras syndrome (CS) are presented in women with Alzheimer's disease. Both patients had the conviction that their husbands had been suplanted by an impostor; in the first one consistently and permanently, and the second one in a fluctuating form. Revision of the literature allows to compare CS with reduplicative paramnesia and ""jamais vu""; and constrast these with prosopagnosia. The physiopathology of CS can be explained by assuming that during face recognition two processes are participating in parallel: a) the recognition of visual details, that allow identification of a face (which is lost in prosopagnosia), and b) the emotional response, which is lost in CS. The loss of familiarity of a known person induces the sensation of an impostor. Functional imaging studies suggest that the posterior cingulate gyrus has a predominant role in the processing of familiar faces and voices"