Introduction: Neurodegenerative disorders, such as Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD), reflect a spectrum of cognitive impairments unified by cognitive decline. Traditional diagnostic approaches often overlook shared landscapes of these disorders. A transdiagnostic approach, cutting across conventional boundaries, may improve understanding of shared mechanisms. This study uses lesion-s...
Objective: To identify whether language impairment exists presymptomatically in genetic frontotemporal dementia (FTD), and if so, the key differences between the main genetic mutation groups. Methods: 682 participants from the international multicentre Genetic FTD Initiative (GENFI) study were recruited: 290 asymptomatic and 82 prodromal mutation carriers (with C9orf72, GRN, and MAPT mutations) as well as 310 m...
While frontotemporal dementia has been considered a neurodegenerative disease that starts in mid-life or later, it is now clearly established that cortical and subcortical volume loss is observed more than a decade prior to symptom onset and progresses with ageing. To test the hypothesis that genetic mutations causing frontotemporal dementia have neurodevelopmental consequences, we examined the youngest adults ...
Background: Behavioural variant fronto-temporal dementia (bvFTD) is characterised by a progressive change in personality in association with atrophy of the frontal and temporal lobes. Whilst language impairment has been described in people with bvFTD, little is currently known about the extent or type of linguistic difficulties that occur, particularly in the genetic forms. Methods: Participants with genetic bv...
Background: Reduced empathy is a common symptom in frontotemporal dementia (FTD). Although empathy deficits have been extensively researched in sporadic cases, few studies have explored the differences in familial forms of FTD. Methods: Empathy was examined using a modified version of the Interpersonal Reactivity Index (mIRI) in 676 participants from the Genetic FTD Initiative: 216 mutation-negative controls, 1...
Introduction: A third of frontotemporal dementia (FTD) is caused by an autosomal-dominant genetic mutation in one of three genes: microtubule-associated protein tau (MAPT), chromosome 9 open reading frame 72 (C9orf72) and progranulin (GRN). Prior studies of prodromal FTD have identified impaired executive function and social cognition early in the disease but few have studied naming in detail. Methods: We inves...
Several CSF and blood biomarkers for genetic frontotemporal dementia have been proposed, including those reflecting neuroaxonal loss (neurofilament light chain and phosphorylated neurofilament heavy chain), synapse dysfunction [neuronal pentraxin 2 (NPTX2)], astrogliosis (glial fibrillary acidic protein) and complement activation (C1q, C3b). Determining the sequence in which biomarkers become abnormal over the ...
Background: Neuroinflammation is emerging as an important pathological process in frontotemporal dementia (FTD), but biomarkers are lacking. We aimed to determine the value of complement proteins, which are key components of innate immunity, as biomarkers in cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) and plasma of presymptomatic and symptomatic genetic FTD mutation carriers. Methods: We measured the complement proteins C1q and ...
Frontotemporal dementia associated with granulin (GRN) mutations presents asymmetric brain atrophy. We applied a Minimum Spanning Tree plus an Efficiency Cost Optimization approach to cortical thickness data in order to test whether graph theory measures could identify global or local impairment of connectivity in the presymptomatic phase of pathology, where other techniques failed in demonstrating changes. We ...
The distinction between sporadic and genetic behavioural-variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD) regarding some neuropsychological (NP) features remains challenging. Specifically, progranulin (GRN)-associated bvFTD frequently presents with early episodic memory impairment and some degree of parietal dysfunction which are supporters of Alzheimer's disease (AD) diagnosis. In this context, we aimed to characterize...