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

Abstract

BackgroundThough meta-analyses of neuropsychological and social cognitive deficits in behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD) have been conducted, no study has comprehensively characterized and compared the neuropsychological, social cognitive, and olfactory profiles in the behavioral and language variants of FTD.MethodsOur search yielded 470 publications meeting inclusion criteria representing 11 782 FTD patients and 19 451 controls. For each domain, we calculated Hedges’ g effect sizes, which represent the mean difference between the patient and control group divided by the pooled standard deviation. The heterogeneity of these effects was assessed with Cochran's Q-statistic using a random-effects model. Meta-regressions were employed to analyze the influence of demographic and disease characteristics.ResultsThough semantic variant primary progressive aphasia patients showed the greatest impairment across all task types, the three groups showed similar cognitive effect sizes once contributions from the language subdomain were excluded from analysis. Contrary to expectation, the magnitude of deficits in executive functioning, social cognition and olfaction were comparable between the three subgroups. Among indices, a metric of executive errors distinguished the behavioral variant of FTD from the language phenotypes.ConclusionsThese data indicate that social cognitive and traditional executive functioning measures may not capture differences between FTD syndromes. These results have important implications for the interpretation of neuropsychological assessments, particularly when applied to the differential diagnosis of FTD. It is hoped that these findings will guide clinical and research assessments and spur new studies focused on improving the measurement of FTD syndromes.

Consensus statement on the neurocognitive outcomes for early detection of mild cognitive impairment and Alzheimer dementia from the Chinese Neuropsychological Normative (CN-NORM) Project

“…The impairment in financial capacity may be explained by the deficit in risk judgment and decision-making [61,62]. Several studies suggest social cognition could be a sensitive predictor of MCI and an index to identify dementia from normal aging individuals [63-65]. Therefore, to increase the ecological utility, the experts agreed to include social cognition in the CNCB.…”

Sodium selenate as a therapeutic for tauopathies: A hypothesis paper

“…Progressive supranuclear palsy, CBS, and svPPA are primarily associated with FTLD-tau, but in bvFTD, the underlying pathology is heterogenous, and therefore, the relationship between clinical presentation and pathology is poorly understood. To date, cognitive impairments, including memory, executive functioning, visuo-construction, language, and behavioral changes have been associated with tau pathology or MAPT mutation (Hu et al, 2007;Grossman et al, 2008;Mendez et al, 2013;Kamath et al, 2019;Poos et al, 2020;Benussi et al, 2021), while social cognition impairments were found in patients with C9orf72 (Russell et al, 2020;Franklin et al, 2021).…”

Comparing Individuals With PPA to Individuals With AD: Cognitive and Linguistic Profiles

“…Initial reports of symptoms in PPA have typically focused on analyzing language function. However, neuropsychological testing has revealed additional executive impairment in PPA variants (Kamath et al, 2019(Kamath et al, , 2020. Individuals with nfvPPA have shown executive deficits on verbal tasks of working memory, verbal fluency, as well as on non-verbal tasks of mental flexibility and abstract reasoning (Macoir et al, 2017).…”