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Behavioural Variant Frontotemporal Dementia: Recent Advances in the Diagnosis and Understanding of the Disorder

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Frontotemporal Dementias

Part of the book series: Advances in Experimental Medicine and Biology ((AEMB,volume 1281))

Abstract

Frontotemporal dementia (FTD), particularly the behavioural variant (bvFTD) form, has fascinated researchers. Recent years have seen an increasing interest in aspects of bvFTD that extend beyond the initial focus on cognitive changes and frontal executive dysfunction. Changes have been identified in aspects including fundamental changes in physiology and metabolism, and cognitive domains such as episodic memory. Work on social cognition has emphasised the importance of a breakdown in interpreting and expressing emotions, while the overlap between psychiatric disorders and bvFTD has been brought into focus by the finding of high rates of psychotic features in carriers of the c9orf72 gene expansion. We review these aspects in the chapter “Behavioural variant frontotemporal dementia: Recent advances in diagnosis and understanding of the disorder” and also potential markers of disease progression and early diagnosis that may aid in the development of treatment options, which have thus far eluded us.

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Acknowledgements

Work reported in this article was supported in part by funding to Forefront, a collaborative research group dedicated to the study of frontotemporal dementia and motor neurone disease, from the National Health and Medical Research Council of Australia (NHMRC) program grant (#1037746 to OP and JRH) and the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders Memory Program (#CE110001021 to OP and JRH) and other grants/sources (NHMRC project grant #1003139 to OP), and Royal Australasian College of Physicians, MND Research Institute of Australia. RA is a NHMRC Early Career Fellow (GNT1120770). OP is an NHMRC Senior Research Fellow (GNT1103258). We are grateful to the research participants involved with our research studies over the years.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Memory and Cognition Clinic, Department of Clinical Neurosciences, Royal Prince Alfred Hospital, Sydney, NSW, Australia

    Rebekah M. Ahmed

  2. Central Sydney Medical School and Brain & Mind Centre, Faculty of Medicine and Health, The University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia

    Rebekah M. Ahmed & John R. Hodges

  3. School of Psychology and Brain & Mind Centre, The University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia

    Olivier Piguet

Authors
  1. Rebekah M. Ahmed
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  2. John R. Hodges
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  3. Olivier Piguet
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Correspondence to Rebekah M. Ahmed .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, Indiana University, Indianapolis, IN, USA

    Bernardino Ghetti

  2. International Centre for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology (ICGEB), Trieste, Italy

    Emanuele Buratti

  3. Department of Neurology, Mayo Clinic, Rochester, MN, USA

    Bradley Boeve

  4. VIB Center for Molecular Neurology University of Antwerp-CDE Antwerpen, Belgium, Department of Neuroscience Mayo Clinic Jacksonville, FL, USA, Antwerpen, Belgium

    Rosa Rademakers

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Ahmed, R.M., Hodges, J.R., Piguet, O. (2021). Behavioural Variant Frontotemporal Dementia: Recent Advances in the Diagnosis and Understanding of the Disorder. In: Ghetti, B., Buratti, E., Boeve, B., Rademakers, R. (eds) Frontotemporal Dementias . Advances in Experimental Medicine and Biology, vol 1281. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51140-1_1

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