Deficits in Everyday Function Differ in AD and FTD

Abstract

Alzheimer's Disease (AD) and Frontotemporal Dementia (FTD) are two neurodegenerative diseases with differing cognitive and neuropathological profiles. While both diseases ultimately result in functional disability, differences in the profiles of everyday functioning between the two groups have not been well characterized. The present study examines potential differences in the types of everyday functional limitations present in these two dementias. The present study compared individuals with AD (N = 240) or FTD (N = 13). The Everyday Cognition (ECog) scale was used to measure distinct domains of everyday cognition: everyday memory, everyday language, everyday visuospatial ability, and a variety of everyday executive abilities. A total ECog score was used to represent global disability level. The groups showed equivalent levels of global disability. However, AD group exhibited worse Everyday Memory and Everyday Visuospatial abilities than the FTD group. Contrary to expectation, FTD was not more impaired in everyday executive abilities. Results remained similar when accounting for severity of cognitive impairment or disease duration. Findings suggest that a somewhat different pattern of everyday functional difficulties can be seen across dementia types.

Classification of Alzheimer's disease and frontotemporal dementia using routine clinical and cognitive measures across multicentric underrepresented samples: a cross sectional observational study

“…The functionality scales did not have high discriminative values in predicting AD and FTD in our study, as previously reported results. 44 , 47 High dispersion of functionality values and the inability to control for other potential confounders such as disease severity could explain the reduced discriminative power and similar impairments in instrumental activities of daily living.…”

A meta-analysis of neuropsychological, social cognitive, and olfactory functioning in the behavioral and language variants of frontotemporal dementia

“…Visuospatial functioning in FTD is relatively spared in comparison with AD and Lewy Body disease (Park et al ., 2015; Pal et al ., 2016) but few studies have analyzed facets of visuospatial functioning in FTD. We found visuospatial deficits to be significantly greater in bvFTD than in the FTD-PPA groups.…”

Everyday cognition scales are related to cognitive function in the early stage of probable Alzheimer’s disease and FDG-PET findings

“…Furthermore, the ECog scale includes numerous everyday cognitive domains other than memory function, such as language, visual–spatial, and executive function. Various dementia syndromes such as behavioral variants of frontotemporal dementia, posterior cortical atrophy, and primary progressive aphasia may initially present as distinct everyday cognitive deficits rather than memory problems, which could possibly be identified using the ECog scale 31 . The ECog scale may therefore potentially help clinicians to more efficiently differentiate among degenerative dementia syndromes.…”