Behaviour in frontotemporal dementia, Alzheimer's disease and vascular dementia

Abstract

Behavioural characteristics accurately differentiate FTD from AD and CvD. The findings highlight the particular importance of affective change in FTD, and underline the role of the frontotemporal lobes in emotion.

Environmental correlates of neuropsychiatric symptoms in nursing home patients with dementia

“…There are a number of limitations to this study: (1) the detected differences between SCUs could in theory be due to non-random sampling of the SCUs in the present study. However, most (51/56) SCUs included in this study were ordinary SCUs with a mixture of patients in various stages of the dementia and did not participate for having patients with remarkably low or high symptoms; (2) we did not categorize the dementia subtype, which is known to be a predictor of neuropsychiatric symptoms (Ballard et al, 1995;Lopez et al, 1996;Lyketsos et al, 2000;Bathgate et al, 2001;Lyketsos et al, 2002), although there is only limited evidence of this in nursing home patients (Drachman et al, 1992;Suh, 2004). Also other relevant patient correlates that we did not measure, such as cognitive or global functioning, pre-onset personality, co-morbidity, pain etc.…”

Frontotemporal Dementia: Paroxetine as a Possible Treatment of Behavior Symptoms

“…There are some behavioral symptoms which are considered specific for FTD, being present in at least 50% of cases [36]. These include loss of basic emotions and social embarrassment, selfishness, disinhibition, irritability, neglect, apathy, altered preference for sweet foods, with a tendency to continue eating for as long as food is present, or to steal food from others’ plates, motor and verbal stereotypies, wandering and an absence of insightfulness.…”

Review of Emotion Recognition in Mild Cognitive Impairment

“…FTD produces a distinct profile of symptoms including loss of insight, social disinhibition, diminished emotions and selfishness [60,61,62], often with little initial cognitive decline [63]. Given the prominent role that behavioural and emotional changes play in FTD patients, it is not surprising that a number of studies have been undertaken to explore emotion recognition in this disease group, and empirical evidence strongly suggests an impaired ability to recognise a range of emotional facial expressions.…”