First Symptoms and Neurocognitive Correlates of Behavioral Variant Frontotemporal Dementia

Abstract

© 2016-IOS Press and the authors. All rights reserved. Background: Previous works highlight the neurocognitive differences between apathetic and disinhibited clinical presentations of the behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD). However, little is known regarding how the early presentation (i.e., first symptom) is associated to the neurocognitive correlates of the disease's clinical presentation at future stages of disease. Objectives: We analyzed the neurocognitive correlates of patients with bvFTD who debuted with apathy or disinhibition as first symptom of disease. Methods: We evaluated the neuropsychological, clinical, and neuroanatomical (3T structural images) correlates in a group of healthy controls (n=30) and two groups of bvFTD patients (presented with apathy [AbvFTD, n=18] or disinhibition [DbvFTD, n=16]). To differentiate groups according to first symptoms, we used multivariate analyses. Results: The first symptom in patients described the evolution of the disease